It was the winter time and the sleeves and pockets to my only jacket, a black blazer, were falling apart. Everything was falling apart. I walked into a Kinkos print shop late one night and used their stapler to staple my jacket pockets shut, so nothing would fall out of them. While I was there I used the same stapler to fix the hem in my pants. People stared at me. No one looked at me like I was one of them anymore.
By Eric Allen Bell
It was 1991, the year I dyed my hair white and then black and then back to its original color.
And I was broke. And I had one friend left who was responsible and had a job and that was Tom. And Tom had a one bedroom apartment in Hollywood. And I lived on the floor. There was already a musician living on his couch, a struggling musician. And I was a struggling writer. But there was a difference and the difference was that the struggling musician was struggling to get an album recorded, to become signed by a record label and to become world famous. I didn't know what I was struggling for, only that I was struggling. It seemed impossible to understand how it had come to this.
And I was drifting, penniless and holes in my shoes from couch to couch to hard wood floor. And one of the conditions of sleeping on Tom’s floor was that I sleep during the day and be gone at night. The musician didn’t like it that I snored and I snored loudly. I was told to try to sleep more quietly but I don’t know how you try to do anything when you're asleep. And that's how I became one of those people who wander the streets of Hollywood at night with no place in particular to go.
I came "home" when the others went to work. It took two comforters wrapped around my skinny pale body to create a makeshift bed on the floor of the living room and that is how I slept. Although the couch did convert into a fold out bed, the couch was already claimed by the musician and the musician didn’t want anyone sleeping on it during the day while he was out. And after a short time of sleeping on the ground I got used to it - fast, like it was where I had always been headed somehow. And the thought of this was oddly comforting.
It had only been a few months since I had quit my job to become a fiction writer. I figured I’d do temporary office work, here and there, and keep my overhead low and mostly just focus on writing. But it didn’t take long for everything to unravel. Eventually I had nothing. I wore the same clothes except for when I had enough change to use the washer and dryer in Tom's building. But usually change was best spent on buying food. And there was never enough of either.
It was the winter time and the sleeves and pockets to my only jacket, a black blazer, were falling apart. Everything was falling apart. I walked into a Kinkos print shop late one night and used their stapler to staple my jacket pockets shut, so nothing would fall out of them. While I was there I used the same stapler to fix the hem in my pants. People stared at me. No one looked at me like I was one of them anymore.
The struggling musician was gay. He had placed a personals ad in the back pages of the LA Weekly and suddenly there were gay men knocking at the door every night go out with him. I asked him what he had said in the ad and he told me that he decided just to tell the truth. Something about how he wasn't like the others, wasn't into material things, was down to Earth and had no time for drama. Suddenly he was the most popular person I knew.
And I wanted that for myself. Not to have hundreds of gay men ringing the doorbell asking for me, but to feel like it was possible to be accepted without pretense. I had shed myself of every outer layer of pretense. Poverty has a way of doing that for you. But I still pretended not to give a shit about anything and I pretended that I didn't feel alone. It was the only layer of skin I had left.
Tom was already engaged to be married at the time. We were all in our mid twenties. I spent most nights sitting at a table at the donut store writing down my thoughts in a notepad, trying to figure out everything - myself, the world, the universe and how to scrounge up enough change to buy a donut.
I sold my watch at a pawn shop the night I sat at Winchell's devouring a chocolate éclair, so hungry I nearly bit off my own fingers while eating it, when I noticed an ad in the back pages of the LA Weekly that said they were running a special offer. Anyone who had not placed a personals ad with them in the past could try it out for free for one week. No money, no credit card needed. All you had to do was call them during business hours and tell them your name and what you want your ad to say. Then they print the ad and you call into to your special voicemail to pick up your messages from all the people who have called you.
It was 1991. Placing a singles ad was still seen as a desperate act and everything about my life was desperate. The opportunity was just too good to turn down. Here is what my ad said when it went to print in the next edition of the LA Weekly:
Broke writer. Smoker. Unemployed, 24 year old male, seeks attractive or unattractive female with a car, a computer (preferably Macintosh), a job or a trust fund and no roommates. I have nothing to offer. Please call.
I told Tom and the musician about the ad and I wanted them to think that I thought it was funny. And they did. They thought it was some kind of hilarious practical joke, but it wasn't. Not to me. When they were not around I picked up the receiver of Tom's phone and checked my messages every chance I got. I mean I called and I called, several times an hour, sometimes and I got nothing. Nothing at all. There wasn't one woman out there in all of Los Angeles who was going to read that personal ad and think, this is it, this is finally the man I've been looking for.
I slept alone on the floor, wrapped inside of two comforters to keep warm, wondering if when I woke up something would be different. She was out there. I knew it. And I knew she was going to call.
But by day five I could no longer sleep. The floor had become harder and my mind was getting louder. And the loud inside my head was only made quieter but picking up the phone and checking my messages. There was nothing to figure out, nothing to understand or resolve. I only had one problem in this world and that was that the she hadn't called me yet. Every crisis was reduced to one unified crisis until at last the moment had come when I entered my pass code and there was a message waiting for me:
"Hi Eric, my name is Shannon and I saw your ad in the L.A. Weekly. You seem nice. I like the sound of your voice and your honesty. Um... Okay, so about me... I work as a paralegal in Pasadena and I'm one year older than you. You mentioned smoking. I don't smoke but I've always wanted to start. Um, I have a Macintosh computer and I drive a Volkswagen Jetta. I own my own condo. Um, what else? Oh, I have long brown hair and brown eyes and I'm about average weight... I'm a little overweight. You said you were a writer? Cool. I'm not doing anything tonight if you want to maybe meet up for drinks or something like that. I'm in Pasadena but I'll drive to wherever you are..."
The feeling of unreality. The kick of adrenalin into the heart, to the head through the limbs. Pulsing. I could breathe again. And I listened to her message one more time and then one more time after that and then again and then again. Again. I couldn't get enough of this feeling. For the first time in too long I felt a sense of purpose. Maybe things were back on track. Maybe it would work out with her.
Here's the thing, I had just gotten out of a very bad breakup with this girl Sabrina. Sabrina was really her name and she really did live in a magical world of fantasy, beauty and fortune. Her father was a doctor out of Boston and she moved to Beverly Hills to live with relatives who got her a job in the entertainment industry and that is where I met her was working at a Talent and Literary agency. They brought in this receptionist which used to be my old job and they told me to train and we had this secret office affair and she got fired for having really bad handwriting and I quit because I was afraid my life was passing me by while I wasted away in an office so I wrote my boss this note saying I quit and that I wanted to pursue my dream of being a writer but then a few weeks later I ran out of money and I couldn't find any temp work and Sabrina had these parents who would leave messages on our answering machine telling her to join "J-Date" and find a nice Jewish guy, which I was not, someone with a good job or in medical school, etc. and this always got me mad and she would stick up for them and then I didn't have any money for food and I started losing all this weight and she wouldn't even loan me enough money to get a microwave burrito from the 7-Eleven and meanwhile her parents were paying all her bills and finally she secretly went out on all these dates with this guy named Seth and when I finally found out she kept talking about how he was able to afford a brand new white leather couch and that she wanted nice things too and that maybe this was just not the life for her and then I couldn't take the humiliation anymore and so I just left and that's when Tom said I could sleep on his floor just until I got things figured out.
And I was just so damned hungry all the time. I'd already hocked all of my records and anything else I had of any value and all the food I could buy with that money was gone and so I noticed that Tom had in on the top shelf of his kitchen the only food item that was there, sort of a food item, actually there was this big plastic jar of protein powder that you are supposed to mix with milk for when you're working out and want to become all buff or something except that I could not afford milk and when I asked Tom if I could drink some with just water he said no because he was saving it to start working out before his wedding so that he would look good in the photos of his honeymoon in Jamaica. But when he was at work, I would climb up on the counter and reach for this stuff and add the chalky substance to water but no matter how long I stirred it was still really clumpy and tasted like medicine but it was better than starving and I don't think he noticed that any of it was gone since he never checked and probably thought that since he put it up so high I would get the message and leave it alone but he was wrong.
Anyway back to the message from the girl. Tom had come home from work and I told him about the call and that I had called her back and that she wanted to meet me at this bar in Hollywood that was like a mile away from where we lived and I asked him if he could give me a ride but he said no because he had this job where he had to get up super early in the morning everyday and worked like twelve hours because he was trying to afford this super expensive wedding ring for Stacey and he just wanted to get some sleep. I asked if I could borrow his car and he said no because I wasn't covered on the insurance. Then I asked him if I could borrow like five bucks so that I could afford to at least buy one cranberry juice so that they don't ask me to leave the bar, which had happened to me before, for sitting there and not ordering anything and he said he didn't want to loan me any money because he didn't believe in loaning money to friends and then he took his bag of McDonalds food and went into his room and closed the door.
I could still smell that delicious aroma of hot French fries lingering in the living room as I sat there on the floor, because I was not allowed to sit on the couch because of the musician and his territorial thing, and I tried to decide what to do.
I was supposed to be there in two hours. I figured it would only take me like a half an hour to walk to the bar and I needed to wait at least an hour for Tom to fall into a deep sleep before I very slowly and quietly tip toed into his bedroom and ever so carefully reached around in the dark looking for the giant dish where he kept all of his spare change. It was a perfect plan, and when I did enter his room ever so quietly and did find the big bowl full of change I kind of made a little too much noise. When I reached for the dish I knocked it over and all of the quarters and pennies and nickels and dimes loudly spilled out on the floor and Tom's voice in the dark said, "Eric put my change back now!" and so I quickly grabbed two handfuls of coins and stuffed them into each side pocket of my jacket and I took off.
Outside on Vine Street it had just rained as I hurried to reach Sunset Boulevard and then Hollywood Boulevard, stopping along the way at stores and restaurants trying to see if anyone would let me trade in all these pennies for dollar bills. As it turns out most of what I had grabbed were just pennies. The girl behind the register at El Polo Loco almost made some change for me but her manager stopped her and then I realized that it was almost time and so I kept on walking.
When I got to Hollywood Boulevard there was this place that cashed checks without ID and sold bus passes and everything. I stood in line to see if they would let me trade in six dollars worth of pennies for dollar bills but the line was going so slow. There were all these homeless people coming in asking everyone for change and a guy with no legs sitting in a wheel chair by the door with a cardboard sign in his lap saying he was a veteran or something and "God Bless You" and I just wanted the line to move because I was now late for my big LA Weekly blind date.
As it was almost my time in line, I looked at my own reflection in the bullet-proof glass. I was overdue for a haircut and my old black blazer looked like I had slept in it. My skin was pale and my eyes looked tired. I looked frail and desperate and possibly homeless and I wondered where it had all gone wrong.
I don't think that my big mistake was quitting my job to become a writer. It was always my plan after I quit to do temp work from time to time and to keep my expenses low so I would have time to write. I let my car get repossessed so I wouldn't have a car payment and for a while I was still able to pay my share of the rent and utilities in the apartment I shared with Sabrina.
At first I was able to really hold it all together. I wrote every single day no matter what. I called the temp agencies in the morning and if they had something for me I took the job. I didn't care if it was just filing or answering the phones, in fact I preferred that. I didn't want to use my brain on work, I wanted to save it for writing. And I had a savings still. There was a discipline to it - alternating between mindless work in a sterile office environment, writing, budgeting my time and energy and money evenly.
Things only really went off the rails when I started to write. I would stay up all night inspired, producing many pages of prose and then sleep in the next day and forget to call the temp agency. Then my moods starting to shift and I didn't like being around people so much and I preferred the night time hours to think. And that might have been where I took a wrong turn. I did a lot of thinking and trying to write something good - not just good but something of value, something meaningful, something true. And that's when the doubt came. Crippling self doubt. Questions about everything and too many of them. What was the nature of reality, the source of consciousness, the purpose behind living? Everything else seemed trivial and overwhelming all at the same time.
And that is when the words stopped flowing. I couldn't finish any of the short stories I had started. My poetry sucked. The novel I wanted to write was locked away in my head and all I was able to do was talk about it, to anyone who would listen, but it never materialized beyond that. In fact, most of my friends had said things like, "So stop talking about it and write the thing already." And then months slipped by and I ran out of money and I ran out of ideas and when Sabrina would come home from acting school I would still be in bed asleep.
So then we had this big talk and she said I was making her depressed and that maybe I should consider trying to get my old job back so I could get insurance and maybe go to a shrink and "get some help" and get on some kind of medication for depression. "And you don't have insurance" she said. "I don't know anyone who goes through life without insurance."
And that is where the fracture began. She didn't believe in me and I didn't believe in myself and it was easier to get pissed off at her than to confront the reality that this intangible thing they call the muse had left me as mysteriously as it had first appeared. I couldn't harness it. It would not play by my rules, not show up when I called upon it. It wanted all of my energy and didn't want to share me with time. Like Time was an energy just like Creativity was an energy and they didn't get along with each other really and I was caught in the crossfire. When I told Sabrina all of this she said, "You really need to get some help".
Just to prove her wrong I got a job working five nights a week, part time, at this telemarketing company calling people at home and setting appointments for someone to come and visit them and talk to them about the importance of a home security system. There was no base pay but you did get paid bonuses for the number of appointments you set and you also got a "bump" if one of the sales calls resulted in someone buying a home alarm system.
At first it seemed like an easy job. It was the first time I had done telemarketing. You just call people and ask them if they own their home, then you start in on this script that went something like this:
"Hi, my name is Eric and I am with United Home Security Systems and I would like to talk to you about the safety of your family. Did you know that last year in the United States there were over five hundred thousand break-ins?"
If they don't hang up or scream at you for calling at dinner time then they will offer an objection. Fortunately for this my employer provided the "Objection Book". It went a little something like this... The respondent says "I don't need an alarm, if someone breaks in I will call the police."
That's when I would reach for what looked like a huge phone book, except instead of there being an A to Z series of index tabs on the right hand side, the indexes actually had the objections. For instance, there would be a huge tab that said "Call 9-1-1". I would quickly flip open to it and say the following:
"Well actually Bob, last year alone over a half a million emergency calls to 9-1-1 went unanswered. Were you aware of this?"
And so on. If Bob told me that he already had a home alarm system, I would turn to the appropriately marked objection page and read verbatim something about how most burglars are experts in identifying all of the systems out there and disarming them in mere seconds - that is except for the alarm system we are selling, of course. No thief could ever figure that one out. "When can we send somebody by to talk to you?"
And if Bob said he had a gun, the objection book would tell me to tell him that he is a hundred times more likely to be shot by his own gun in his own house, by accidentally shooting himself or a family member shooting him.
And if Bob said he had bars on the windows, you get the idea. Eventually Bob would be made to understand that they were coming for him. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but they are coming. And when they arrive they are going to pop open those bars in the windows, disarm his inferior alarm system, rape his dog, poison his wife and then shoot him with his own gun. Bob was fucked unless he met with us. That was the bottom line.
"Now Bob I'm looking here and I see that we already have a rep out in your area tomorrow night around this same time. Should I put you down for eight o'clock?"
Did I mention that the boiler room I worked in, the one with rows and rows of depressing little gray cubicles also had hundreds of colorful balloons on the walls? That was one of the perks of getting to work at the sales arm of United Home Security Systems. I tried to explain that to Sabrina one morning when I asked her if she could loan me enough money for bus fair and to get something to eat.
I needed bus money and I was starving and I asked her for five bucks, just to loan it to me, just for that night because I was sure I would be able to pay it back when I got home. I said:
"Please Sabrina, I just know that I'm going to pop a balloon tonight. It's just five dollars."
And she said, "That's what you said before and you didn't pop any balloons."
And I said, "Are you trying to destroy my confidence as a sales person?"
And she said, "You're not in sales, you just set appointments."
And I replied, "Exactly, and how hard can that be? Look, every time I successfully set up a meeting and it gets confirmed by my manager I get to select a balloon from the wall and..."
"I know how it works, Eric."
It worked like this: If you set at least 3 appointments for the night you get to select a balloon from the wall for each appointment that the manager confirmed. Now, inside of each balloon was a folded up Post-it note - a voucher. Handwritten on that note would say either $5 or $10 or $20 or $50 or even $100. It was a surprise. But you had to get three appointments confirmed the same night in order to qualify. And the last time I had borrowed money from Sabrina I'd only gotten two of my appointments to confirm. The last one turned out to be a crazy woman who would agree to anything and kept going on and on about how Radar from "Mash" was outside digging in her trash cans. And, the time I borrowed money from Sabrina before that, I had borrowed ten dollars and both of my vouchers each said $5 - some of which I used for my bus ride home and for some McDonald's French fries which I bought by walking through the drive through. She said she wasn't falling for it anymore. As if I had planned the whole thing - planned to fail. "Everyone chooses their own destiny" she said. And the destiny she had chosen apparently involved her parents sending her a extra money every month to make sure she never knew what it means to struggle.
There was a woman at work who always seemed to sit on the balloon with the $50 voucher in it. It was uncanny. Did I mention that part of the deal was that you had to sit on the balloon in order to pop it? Mine were always only $5 but everyone in the office still clapped because part of the policy there was that everyone has to clap after someone sits on and pops a balloon. I think the $50 girl was planted there by the management. I had a feeling that the whole world worked that way. I shared this insight with Sabrina once and she cut said that she had already had to listen to that tirade from me once before and that I needed to stop looking for the deeper meanings in things and just focus on working hard and being productive..
"Why?" I said, "So I can buy you a white leather fucking couch?"
And so it came to pass that no matter how many times I pleaded and promised I was sure I was going to sit on a balloon that night, she would never again loan me any money. And she was right. The vouchers never added up to be enough to both eat and pay her back.
And now here I was standing in a check cashing joint on Hollywood Boulevard and it had started to rain again outside and when I got to the front of the line the guy behind the bullet-proof glass said they did not need any pennies and that I did not have enough other coins to add up to even a one dollar bill. And I was late for my big date.
And I was struck with panic.
I ran across the rain drenched street. I could feel my socks getting wet. My shoes slippery on the pavement. There was water on the windshields of the cars whizzing by. No one could see me out there, their hostility accidental as I ran to get out of the road before being struck down. Everyone behind the wheel was living in their own movie and it had nothing to do with my own. I needed to get to the sidewalk, and when I did I stood there with my back up against the wall behind the awning of a falafel shop avoiding the rain as it poured down on everything that wasn't covered.
A Los Angeles city bus pulled up to the curb and people poured out into the pouring rain, some with raincoats, some without, some holding up their hands with newspapers to cover their heads and some who just didn't care.
I was almost to the bar and only twenty, thirty minutes late at the most. I hoped she would still be there. I reached into my pocket to make sure my change was safe and my finger slipped into a brand new hole. The change was gone. I could see it glistening in the street, shiny beneath the rain drops and scattered across the asphalt reflecting headlights. To try to retrieve it would be a suicide mission and possibly worth it. The front door to the bar was just around the corner and she was waiting for me there. I tried to imagine walking in to the place without even enough change to buy even myself a cranberry juice or a club soda. And I stood in front of the door and tried to get up the nerve to go in there anyway.
I gazed in through the window, although the glass was covered with rain. I looked to see if she was there and there she was - exactly as she described herself but warped like a fun house mirror through the moving droplets that clouded everything. She sat alone waiting, waiting for me, waiting for me exactly the way I had described myself. I wondered how long she was waiting and how much longer she was willing to wait and how long it would take if we were ever together for her to realize that I wasn't half the man I described myself to be in that LA Weekly personals ad. I wasn't even that. I turned around to face the rain and I walked away.
THE END
© Copyright 2009 Eric Allen Bell
http://www.EricAllenBell.org