Flight of the Phoenix

The Last Stand (Genesis) by Darrell Goodman

2011-01-11T22:43:00.000-08:00

There used to be a time when I would take the things that pissed me off and plant them here in this electronic space. I would forward and email and send links all over the place in hopes of getting my words to the masses. It was all I knew, words that is. And I sharpened them to the finest point before pulling back the bowstring of cyberspace and taking my shots. It was the attitude that I had about all things literary. Do what you feel. Channel your emotions into a public space and let the fireworks begin. But what happens when the world runs out of room for words? What happens when the only thing we tell ourselves we only have time to push 'play' or tweet about it?

In a world where we barely make a phone calls to say 'happy birthday' to people we've known most of our lives (as a wall message on Facebook is deemed good enough) why does critical discourse even matter? This is not to say that I'm walking away from the written word or from the world of publishing, or from making my opinions known. But as a means of protest that shit is as dead as Cross Colors and those leather hats like the one Eddie wore in The Golden Child. It's time for an upgrade.

Tonight I put myself in front of the idiot box, hoping that my rather reliable sense intuition about things audio visual was wrong. I turned to a program created by someone who I've come to trust for at least consistent entertainment. And it failed miserably for me (but I'll admit that I'm not the true target audience. During one of the most highly-promoted premieres since the birth of Steve Urkel, I watched some really good performers struggle with material that had no reason to fail. It should have been a creative cakewalk. But it wasn't.

I thought about the word on the street out here in Hell-A: "There's no work for Black actors. So they'll do just about anything." My mother is just happy that there are two channels full of programming featuring people who look like her. That's all that her generation wanted. But I want something more.

It's funny that I've spent so much time in these last few years feeling like what I needed to do was bow out. What was a smart boy who went to college and has his father for his best friend to do when a cross-dressing hack is king of the hill? Don't get me wrong. I'll have love for his business gangster until the day I die. But just last year, when I was new in town and working the craft services table on a low-budget indie, I listened to Fred Williamson, ex-football star and blackploitation kingpin said. And I quote "That man has set us back 25 years." But this isn't about him either. This is about me.

Just a few days ago I was sitting next to a partner of mine talking about a breakfast I had with John Singleton years ago, and my run-isn with Spike, Forrest Whitaker, Reginald Hudlin, Matty Rich, and Ted Lange. What he said to me, which was easily one of the greatest compliments I've ever gotten, was "If you're looking for somebody who knows more than you, or is better than you, you're not gonna find him."

As I walked home that night (which no one does in LA), broke, semi-homeless and with a memory card full of trials and tribulations that should have killed me, his words haunted me like the strangest of phantoms. What if he was right? It wasn't so much a question of my own self-confidence as it been my pseudo decision to walk away from a rigged game. But the truth was that there was no walking away. This was the only one game I was born for.

So as I sharpen new arrows for a more sophisticated bow, I remind myself that my way has always been about building from the bottom. The "right" people tend to find me. The equipment and the actors and the financing falls in the place the minute when I'm back on point and ready to don the cape and cowl one more time. It's easy to take on an army with .25 when you've got nothing to lose, and their their slugs miss all the vital parts.

It was in darkness that I assembled the pieces to the puzzle I hoped to burn to a crisp. But no dice. It wasn't that easy before. And it won't be again. But I am going to change this game with me and mine, even if we have to do it all by ourselves.

The Next Episode

2010-06-20T23:16:00.000-07:00

When I landed on this rock I thought it was because I had sinned against God. When I say "sin" I don't just mean that I violated one of the ten commandments (which I've done my share of times over the course). Being pushed westward, to me, meant that I had done something along the lines of robbing a church bingo game or committing adultery on my wedding night. Something extra bad. That was the only explanation.

LA was the one city I'd visited (other than Boston) that I found uninhabitable by my kind (my kind being introverted constant thinking with tastes ranging light years beyond what's hot in People Magazine). It's a shallow haven made for C students and people whose parents didn't love them enough. It is a cesspool where the not-as-weak prey upon the needy and defenseless in the name of fame, dough, and their 15-minutes on TMZ.

I showed up chasing a rabbit that would morph into many different things and folks along the way. But I never stopped going after it. There's something in me that would rather die than living knowing that I didn't see the journey through, because in some ways it's the only that survived the inferno that turned most of my life as I knew it into ash in the winds of change.

I reforged old friendships and made a great many new ones. I got robbed. I had my life threatened on numerous occasions. Two of my supposed closest friends cut me loose the minute I blew into town. My hook-ups didn't get hooked. My aces got cut by spades. Everything I knew would happen didn't. But somehow, each and every time I stood surrounded, my weapons out of ammo and my saber worn dull by an onslaught of enemies, the hand of God kept pushing me along like it was'89. Life went on. The lesson: Drop me in the worst hole in the world and I'll know the terrain in no time.

I didn't win in the way I thought. But I also didn't lose. I survived. And maybe that was the point. When I first started this blog I was trying to keep myself sane. I needed to be reminded that I was a writer, regardless of all the things that had gone haywire, regardless of my finances, regardless of the happiness I chased into corners where I didn't belong. I needed something to be proud of on days that were easily some of the hardest and worst I ever had to live through.

I called this blog "Flight of the Phoenix" because I thought that I was leaving my heart behind to chase after business. But it had much more to do with me needing to crawl into my cocoon and become something else entirely. I always thought I could win my war safely from a distance, armed with rifle, scope and goggles, never having to witness the carnage on the battlefield up close.

I never had to look falling soldiers in the eye and watch the light leave them. I never had to fear for my life at the hands of men with nothing to lose. And I needed all of those experiences for where I'm headed next. My bag of tricks is getting heavy.

All of this is the prelude to my goodnight kiss. This is the last entry for this blog, as the contents therein will be the skeleton for a book project, my first full-fledged memoir. By the time the story's done I hope to have the balls to put it in print and give it back to you. But until that day comes, you'll be able to find me on my own site, which will be up by the end of summer. But let me leave you with a final, elongated rant.

As a boy who has always been living in the future, I often make the mistake of want to the end result of a series of events. Though I make it well, I tend to think of the bread as already eaten when it's still in the oven. I saw her face ten years older yesterday, never understanding that she wasn't grown enough to make the words matter.

Looking back there was so much in the in-between that I overlooked. It was alternate careers, wealth, travel, loves lost before I saw that they were even there. It was moments I wasted in 20-something land, truly believing that time was an endless wave I could ride for eternity. Thus I never saw the crash coming. The didn't see the whale until it was swallowing me whole.

After days and night in darkness it spat me back onto the beach where I started. But that's the next story. I'll let you know when I'm ready to tell this tale.

End of line.

R.I.P. David Mills

Babel

2010-06-03T16:46:00.000-07:00

Far be it from me to consider myself a religious thinker. But sometimes words come together in my mind like the notes in a composition. The sound of it fills my head until it spills off of my tongue, or dribbles onto a page like this one.

I'm thinking about Baba Neil, an elder in my community back in Brooklyn. While riding shotgun in his truck a few years ago he commented that what we did is "a way" but not necessarily "the way". For a Christian-born boy like myself his words were walking the fine line between religious tolerance and blasphemy. The way I was raised you chose a way and had to consider it "the way" Convert or go to hell. Convert or be destroyed. You're not one of us so you're the scum of the earth.

It all made me think about that famous parable in the Bible about the Tower of Babel. According to it men decided to build a tower tall enough that it would reach the heavens. Men just knew they had what it took to stand shoulder to shoulder with The Lord Almighty.

God's retaliatory strike was to make them all speak different languages so that they could no longer understand one another. When there was no communication construction came to a standstill. The threat to God ended and life went on. I loved that story when I was a kid. But as a man I now see that it's true meaning(in my opinion) has been overlooked by the masses of Christians for a long time.

For one, the spirit world isn't exactly "up", but more like over there, another dimension of the same space we inhabit. Some of us can step halfway in and out. Others only know it from what we read or what we're told. Second and more importantly, I believe that the tower in itself was merely a symbol of understanding. Though we've come to know the confusion that God created to be about the origin of languages, but what if it were really about the true nature of Divine order?

If you broke the tower into pieces and gave one to each group or sect in the world, each of them would walk away with a fragment of the truth, but never the full picture. What if the only difference between Christ, Buddha, Muhummad, Judaism, the orisha, etc. was how the story was told and what was emphasized by those who told it based upon their groups own beliefs?

In doing that we would all know just enough about our Creator without knowing the full deal. For each of us the rest of it would be about using faith to fill in those gaps and doing our best to live our lives accordingly.

While in the shower today, the place where I do some of my best thinking, I (for the millionth time) asked myself if the person who created everything would really have the time to be caught in specific names and strict constructionalist ideals. If she/he made everything then she/he has an intimate understanding of it all, right? At least I see it that way. Lately I've found myself reading the teaching of the Buddha and about Sikhism and traditional Jewish thought. It's mainly for the sake of my own well-being.

One day I may find myself in a circle of Imams in Kandahar, or dining with rabbis in Tel Aviv. In my very limited travels I've seen the kind of appreciation that has come from the folks who could see what I at least made an effort to learn their ways before I enter their homes or dwelling places.

I was watching something the other day and there was a line of dialogue that said
"You didn't fail. You just dreamed the wrong dream". I beat up on myself for a long time about things that didn't happen, mainly because I only aspired to live up to a fragment of my destiny, a puzzle I'll assemble in this life with no full sense of what it all means. But I'm not afraid anymore, not of being alone, not of dying(as long as it's for something), not of letting go of my possession in the name of something greater on the other side of the hill.

Someone said that makes me fearless. That's not true. I'm just learning, grain by grain, how to keep that fear from controlling me, from making me run when I should stand tall, from making me settle for less when I deserve me, for no longer trying to save those who refuse to look at their own selves in the mirror first. For so long I kicked and screamed about wanting my old life back. Now I'm so glad that I set it on aflame in the first place. End of line.

A Janitor's Lament

2010-04-28T20:30:00.000-07:00

I have a friend who thinks the world is a shiny happy place. She describes as a condition where she can only see the brighter side of things. No matter how horrible a tale I'm telling her about the Ulysses-like journey I've been on for the last seven years she kind of dismisses it as if tomorrow is another day. I envy her in some ways. I wish I knew what it's like to not feel pain, as the world where I live is full of it. Now it's a given that the anguish I'm enduring is a childbirth of sorts. I am pushing the man I should be out of my own canal of sorts, seeing myself as child and the mother who is flat-lining on the table.

What can a man who hates being idle do when his hands are tied while he watches his old house burn all around him? It isn't the fire or the smoke that bothers me as much as being forced to witness my own demise, the product of all the things I tried ignore in the name of maintaining what I had. So God bound my limbs knowing that when it was over I could sift through the ashes and see just how right he was.

I spent my entire childhood and 20s trying to pull other people out of their burning buildings. Sometimes I was sent. Other times I volunteered. I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to help. But the lesson that I didn't get is that most of the time the only person I could really save was myself. I had this list of people in my head who I knew would always be there, those with whom I would toast on the other side of this in celebration of Spring after the longest winter I'd ever known. But as that table approaches those seats are vacant or filled with newer faces who have shown me what real honesty and friendship are.

I was a lion who grew up believing it was a kitten. I often tried to meow only to learn that there was a roar within. All I wanted was a door that allowed me to come and go as I pleased and bowl with my name on it. What I needed was a den where I could call my own. So many souls tried to hustle me into believing that their pads were the lair I sought. They lured me in and tried to lock the door behind me, certain that the barrier would hold. Sometimes I slashed through steel like it was paper. Other times I merely walked through the walls without as much as a second thought. I knew I was a grown man when I saw these charlatans before they ever rang my doorbell. Once I stuck with intuition, despite their well-crafted pitches, I found myself stopping the bullets before they ever arrived, instead of taking in vital places just because I knew they wouldn't kill me.

So I'm pouring rum over the mother hen who used to be and watching her burn. The hands I used to use to heal the masses are now reserved for those who stitched me up without having their own agendas. At the same time I have to be open to those who need me, to the cases that I'm assigned and just every broken-winged bird that flutters through my window. My personal life shouldn't be a community service project.

At the same time I can no longer afford to bring my wrath down upon the world for the crimes of selected few, a few who seem smaller and lamer with each day that I keep on living. As the fire consumes them I find myself smiling. All the love in the world can't change what things are destined to be. End of line.

A Treatise On Butterflies

2010-04-02T16:16:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in a cabin,
On golden pond,
A butterfly made a prison break,
by fluttering through the bars,
leaving its old body behind,
in a shredded shell.

Seeing freedom for the first time
she perched on the first open window she saw,
And flew inside,
An invisible man gave her a kiss of life,
She got what she wanted,
Then it was time to go.

Across the street was a bigger house,
With bigger toys,
The dwelling of a prince always
overshadows the pauper's,
The rain comes down in knifes,
cutting away what the moment
no longer needs.

A soul can take flight from itself,
but eventually loses its wings,
a karma chameleon always ready
to pick the next color
for its next life,
until it needs to escape
...again

Playing By Heart

2010-03-31T23:44:00.000-07:00

Generally I don't like human beings. I tend to view us as a planet full of God' developmentally disabled. We are petty. We are inexplicably violent. And it's in our nature to form groups that in one way or another exclude people, regardless of whether or not we have a valid reason.

I can't believe I haven't blogged in this long, but the writing and production process for Inter-Course has taken up a good deal of my time. The rest of the last six months have been spent reaching for the soap on a noose that I dropped on the floor of a prison shower known a ghostwriting a celebrity memoir. It wouldn't even be fair to say that this person is much of a celeb anymore. But he knew enough to get him a check from a publisher. And that was when I came in.

At the time I was living at home with my mother. Having been shorted by several clients in a row I had given up my crib and taken refuge in the only place available. The phone rings. Someone is on the other line who I consider a friend, a friend who every once in awhile tries to throw me some work. I get a pluck on the back of my neck when I hear the name. This is one of the last people I'd want to be joined at the hip with. But when I hear the payday I'm already reconciling my financial wrongs and living in a phat crib in Silverlake as soon as I get to LA. I say 'yes'.

The first problem is that it takes another nine months for me to get a contract. Then it's close to eight weeks before I get a check. I'm supposed to fly to their location, spend two weeks there, get what I need, come back and finish the book, all before Christmas. That was the plan. But that wasn't what happened.

I won't go into specifics but he ends up spending more time in the booth than in front of my mic. He generalizes about what he needs to be specific about. He hates the music I love. His life, as I see it, is that of man living in the better days long gone. All I have to do it make it all look good.

But it's not that simple. He's an artist and he's sensitive about his shit. Somewhere in the middle he has a crisis of conscious. He doesn't want people to know about all of the dirt he mentioned in his book proposal. He doesn't like what I'm writing, but he can't tell me how to do it better. So close to a month is spent with him dragging his feet. Then the publisher comes a calling. He either wants his book or his money back. All eyes are on me. My friend, who is up to her processed curls in the entire deal, playing all sides from the middle, tells me I have to finish the book without the guy whose name is going on the tell-all. Can I do it? I tell her I can try. And that's all she needs to hear.

As it turns out, my "friend" offered me the job because she knew I'd probably take it. And she knew I'd trust her. So when certain things I wanted didn't come back in the contract I assumed that the publisher wasn't budging. Then I caught her in one lie. And then another. Then I threaten to quit unless I get more money to endure this madness and she conveniently removes that part of the email from what she forwards to her boss. She's so focused on getting out of her desk job and into the showbiz big time that pimpin' me ain't no thang.

I figure all of this out by what her boss doesn't tell me over drinks at a high-end hotel. And when I do clarify why I'm there and what I need from him, he gives the kind of "if we can do it" clause that I've used when I was looking for a safe way out of the room, from which I'll never return. Do I rewrite the book under a crazy deadline while the sharks(bill collectors) are nipping at my flesh from all around. Or do I do my best to sink the entire ship just so these people know not to fuck with me again! There's only one answer: B

For one, my "friend" needs to know her pass into my world has been completely revoked. Two, even though I'm ghosting it, this project is a waste of paper better served for Inter-Course. Three, every couple of years I have to throw hands with somebody just to let them know that nice guys will still knock you the fuck out!

I'm surprisingly calm about coming to this decision now. Sure it leaves the rest of my world up in the air like Clooney and Farmiga, but I've always been good for standing for something, even when I didn't particularly want to. As for the money, fuck it! The check ain't enough to buy my general sense of loathing towards all involved. And luckily I do have a clause against anyone trying to out me as the author.

You see at a time when I'm starting to see so many of the people who used their supposed "friendships" with me to achieve whichever means. This particular person apparently saw me as a grade-A sucker, which I saw myself as just another dude on the bus trying to make a living. But that ain't the truth.

The lesson of Hollywood Shuffle is that there's always work at the post office. You don't have to play their game if you don't want. It's no different with writing for a living, especially not now when there are people on the net trying to get folks to write articles for ten dollars a piece and in bulk. The next time any of these people see me, it'll be in a cameo on screens big or small, or through the glass of the 'down' elevator while I'm on my way up.

Even when you've lost everything you can still keep your soul. End of line.

From The Ashes

2010-01-20T16:39:00.000-08:00

Outside the rain falls in a consistent stream. It's been three days now and my lawn is covered with dead palm fronds blown loose by the winds. What's dead falls away when it's no longer needed. I like it when it rains here, especially as it's so rare. Sure people don't know how to drive in it and my walls aren't insulated so it makes it colder. But this it the time when this place gets fed, where the cool water keeps the dust and haze at bay.

I've just finished the first book I'll ever publish under my own label. It is about love and sex and food and will most likely bring me both acclaim and scorn from at least a few of the unidentified women mentioned within its pages, though most will take it as a gift. Still, I was always afraid to bet on myself. From what I'd been taught doing it on your own meant that you weren't good enough for the system. But I was in the system long enough to feel like the smart guy stranded on a cruise ship of fools. I'm still amazed that I gave up so many of my own children to be adopted by foster parents who just saw them as a paycheck. But not this time.

I worked hard for the system because it paid me better than the magazines did. It put me in 4 star hotels and let me ride on planes for free. I was one of the cool kids, one of the stars in the sky, not understanding that most of those I hoped to reach could only see the cloud above, but not the light beyond them. If I fail I won't be able to blame anyone but myself. If I succeed I'll make more money in one shot than I did in the last five.

I picture myself in jackets by Armani and Joseph Aboud, a car made in this millennium and having the money for the film and editing equipment I need to make my next ventures real. My sisters will be in college in a flash. My parents are getting older. I have to make this my moment, by any means necessary.

Somewhere inside of me this switch flipped. I got tired of getting strapped with the worst jobs just because I was the only one who could finish them. I got tired of that dreaded moment around the 21st where I started worrying about what a friend of mine refers to as "the monthly miracle" of making the rent on time. In a way it is now, when the odds are the most against me, that I feel like I'm destined to shine, even if it's only to the dusting of folks who usually manage to see the light.

If I reach past them into the mosh pit of the masses then I quickly become something else, a soul much larger than I might have ever expected, one who wields more power than I have ever felt comfortable with. I just wanted to be another drone in the hive. But now I know for certain that the hive can't hold me.

I felt this day coming years ago. But I wanted it to be soft and cushy. I didn't want the bumps and bruises. What I've learned on this road is that it's our scars that define us, our stories of adversity told in the sunlight on the other side. What I thought was giving up was me hiding in a hole, trying to wait for the storm I had to face to magically pass over without me facing the thunder's roar. Am I still afraid? Yes. But I can't let my fear control me.

So now with nothing but shield and sword I march as an army of one against a legion of shadows. I was stripped of what comforts I had as it was the only way that I might see where I was standing and what was at stake. My enemies took their best shots at my head, but missed. My true friends carried me when my legs could no longer take the weigh.

I'm taking the advice of the ancestors and living in a tomorrow that has yet to arrive. I am playing Job and Jonah after their trials has ceased. I am reducing a city to ash so it might fertilize the new dream, the one where I become the team captain I, as nerd, always despised.

I am buildin' me a new home brick by brick, one the big bad wolves will never blow down. End of line.

Inspired by Mahogany Browne's forthcoming 'Swag"

2010-01-14T15:18:00.000-08:00

The In Between

I often sit down to write you letters
But they come out in someone else's script
And I know you'll just ignore him
or pretend that they got sent to the wrong box
The one you never check

If I shot the arrow yesterday
and it gets there tomorrow,
how do I deal with today,
the stretch where you don't
see it coming?

You toss the secrets I share
out of windows
to free weight on a plane
that's destined to land safely.

I am an exit far beyond your sight line,
Plugging the holes in the asphalt,
while you sleep,
so you get home
to Me
safely

The Sum of All Fears

2010-01-11T10:44:00.000-08:00

My father hasn't been out of the hospital for two weeks after surgery on his spine. But he's already walking around the house and climbing stairs. There are exercises that he's supposed to do twice a day for physical therapy. So he does them three times.

My mother is not truly happy unless she's working, or serving, or providing. What she doesn't say she proves with her actions. Not being able to do can frustrate her to the point of anger. Her not knowing what to say can lead to uncomfortable silences that can go on for a lifetime.

These are the rivers from which my lifeforce flows. These are the genetic blocks from which I was assembled. Mercury is in retrograde for four more days. I'm in a block of ice for another 96 hours. It's one of the times when I wish that I could pencil in some face time with God. I'm not talking about prayer but the idea that I can close my eyes and wake up in some elaborate executive office where the Big Woman/Man sits and runs the universe.

I'm sure my questions would not be original, as they center around why in the hell I'm right here and right now. Why is the life I'm living so much bigger and more complicated than the one I dreamed of having, than the one that made sense. Why couldn't it be written that the rest of my life was to be spent in a three-bedroom townhouse on some street in the old neighborhood? Why is it that so many forces have been trying to take me out when I feel as if I have nothing they want?

The best thing about the Creator is that he answered your questions about an hour before you asked them. Even if it takes years for the answers to get to you, in his eyes your case is already closed. You're out of the pit and back in the race, burning rubber towards the next chapter in your destiny.

Last night I sat at a bar in Santa Monica with my godsister and my boy D-Pace. I've known Pace for a decade now. And though our run-ins have always been at their weird junctures in our lives, he's one of those folks who helps me to solve the Sajak-like puzzle of my given dilemmas.

He reminded me that struggle is a requirement for genius and evolution. If you don't have a reason to move forward you'll stay where you are. You'll do only what it takes to maintain what you have. Your possessions begin to matter more than the energy that brought them to you. It makes sense when I think about what I gave up to get to wherever 'here' is. I am naked standing in the cold before a brand new campus, a whole new school, one where my job is equal parts teaching and learning.

In the year behind me I found myself living through so many of my worst nightmares. It was almost as if whatever I said that I didn't want to do was what ended up being next on the agenda. But if I hadn't, I wouldn't have known that none of those things could beat me, that no matter where I was I was still the same. Sure the lessons been there before, but in the midst of crisis, a soul like mine needs many reminders. It's the only way I make it day to day. End of line.

Male Bonding

2009-12-31T01:27:00.000-08:00

Miles away from here my father is recovering from surgery on a herniated disk. It's the first surgery he's ever had in his life. He spent Christmas Day in a hospital room. But he wasn't alone. His family was with him.

On the other side of the world I am listening to a track my new homeboy is playing for him. Within it is a recorded message from his father, one of the last he received before the man who brought him into the world passed on. We talk about our experiences. We reflect on both knowing what it's like to hit rock bottom. He has a house of his own now. I have my first place. We both want more out of life. And we're willing to go after it.

One of the things I rarely accounted for in my life was making new homeboys. Women are much more social creatures. They form alliances and friendships because it's the way business is done. With men it's about tests and trials. Having your dude's back is a something much more. It's willing to put your life on the line in a certain. Even if the days of gunshots and group fights are far behind, the instincts your used in those places stay with you, no matter where you are.

There are two men I've met here who have taken me by surprise in their acts of friendship towards me. We love women. We love music. We love films. Though there are religious, philosophical and other differences, we've got enough in common to deal with each other day week to week.

There's something to be said for having a dude you can have a beer with or talk to about anything from girl problems to the fact that your phone isn't on. There's something to be said for having a night out on the town where no one is carrying a purse or worried about their outfit, or appearing to be sand on whichever beach you may have washed up on. I love my sistas dearly, but a little dude time here and there is crucial to my sanity.

So as I listen to my homeboy's track and take in the atmosphere of the home he's remaking into his own image, I feel this strange kind of peace, this sense that I'm not the last man on earth or just a Charles in Charge of the quartet of females I often feel charged to look after. I savor every second of this male bond that's forming. Knowing there's someone else stranded on the island makes me feel a little better about being there. End of line.

Kalifornia Dreamin'

2009-12-27T02:35:00.000-08:00

There are four days left in the hardest year of my life thus far. I got sold out. I got ripped off. I took jobs that I knew would be a disaster because they were the only ones that landed in my inbox. I kept a blade in my sister's bookcase to protect us against a Bigger Thomas. I moved into a crib with bulletholes in the rear screen, a sign of different times in this hood's history now long gone.

I am tired. I am scarred. But regardless of what happens I don't have regrets. I have done more at 34 than most people do in a lifetime. And though these have been dark times, I exist in one of those rare moments where I know that I am far from done.

I've made a decision to start a new business, an offshoot of my first publishing venture to launch in the upcoming summer. My new staff chose me more than I chose them. My new best friend is a person I haven't seen in 11 years. If there's one thing I'm certain of, it's that I don't know a damn thing at all. And that's a start.

My father is out of the hospital and healing. My mother is evolving with the guidance of God and her ancestors. We hold each other up in times of struggle. Blood is a bond unbroken by time or circumstances. Here in the darkness a plan is coming together. I am Hannibal charging towards an empire atop an elephant, a symbol of wisdom.

I have enough of the pieces to see the pic picture, a flash of a woman in stockings and a gold leotard standing in front of silver glass. I just wanted to be a fisherman who fed is family. But my life has never been that simple.

Time is a bizarre thing. Or at least humankind's concept of it is. I've been advised to live in the year ahead instead of now. All those things I lost in the fire were rotting me from the inside out. The carnage I passed through was a cleansing. The demons on my trail were really angels. Jacob's Ladder turned out to be a stairway to the next level.

It's 2:48 am and I'm wide awake and loving it. It reminds me of late nights in that shoebox in Crown Heights almost ten years ago. I wrote late nights after teaching night school, living off of chicken wings, shrimp fried rice and strawberry Haagen Daaz. Looking back I see where that extra 20 lbs came from. I'm finally living on my time again. Now I just have to make the most of it. End of line.

Back to The Future

2009-12-15T10:18:00.000-08:00

I had a dream once. It seemed as simple as that single from the 36 Chambers. It was the end to a road that led me home, or at least to where I thought home was. It had to be close because I could taste it. I could feel it. It was as real to me as the air I breathe, the sum of simple mathematics equaling gold at the end of a candy-coated rainbow.

I thought life was one long interstate but it's more like a series of connections.
You get lost. You get found. You stop to rest. You push yourself to the limit. The illusion of my youth was that I set the pace, that I could make things happen whenever I wanted. The truth, however, is that even my sense of time is a joke to the folks up above.

So I am taking a dream and putting it in a box. The arrow I shot towards my target yesterday won't get there until tomorrow. But I know it hits bullseye. In the meantime I'm living in today, starting an entire volume between chapters that I didn't expect to be there.

It's the biggest surprise I've had in my life thus far. It gleams like diamonds set in silver, the antidote to the coven of vampires who fed on me for a lifetime. I am Icarus surfacing in tranquil waters, made anew by a different kind of trinity.

This job I'm working continues to be a trial. The deadline has been extended but the stupidity has multiplied a million times squared. It makes me want the rest of the world to forget about me. I want to dissolve into nothingness, disappear from almost all who matter to me, so that I can return as the something more than I can manage to remember within crisis, a man I thought I would forget.

I once lived alone in a fortified fortress. Those who visited gave advance notice. Those who stayed did so by invitation only. I thought my life here would be a repeat of there. But instead I now have four women to look after, and none of them have anything to do with my love life(or lack thereof). My apartment is being reborn by dying. The roof, the fridge, the dryer, the garbage disposal, and now the electrical wiring all collapsed, only to be remade better. It is slowly becoming the place I saw in my dreams. It will get where I want it be, in its own time.

So I'm taking a glowing grain of starlight from the dark skies behind and putting it in a little box, one to be stored alongside others within the echoing space at the base of my being. I will seal it and mark it, saving that collective moment until it is now, instead of then, the starting point for a spinoff that I thought was the original.

The pilot of now is just beginning. The characters are all being cast after so many wash-outs were clipped. The cameras are rolling, and I, the director, am calling for action. End of line.

Fresh Air @ 2:48 AM

2009-12-09T02:48:00.000-08:00

A pickup truck slows in front of the window by my desk. My sleep-deprived brain is paranoid. I'm thinking home invasion. I'm thinking undercover cops. Then I remember that the only crime I'm committing is having agreed to do a job under this kind of a deadline for less money than I'm used to getting for the work.

The desk hadn't been reasembled an hour before I started using it. Showers and shaving are my only luxuries. Between pages I'm caulking the windows. The new crib has windows from the Nixon era. They're an energy saver's nightmare.

The Genius bar on my Itunes is saving my life. There are pages of notes and transcriptions everywhere. I'm mainlining coffee as almost everyone I know in the world is asleep. I think of my dreams, of my own projects, of Avatar and Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes. Jill Scott to Maxwell to Anthony Hamilton. If it weren't so late I'd be blasting M.O.P. or Incubus until the walls shook.

It was afternoon the last time I went to bed, then prime time when I woke up. I think of my family on the other side of the world. I think they're all worried that I'm not coming home for Christmas. I'd rather die first.

I need this moment. I need this blog because it's mine, not me inhabiting the skull of the voice on the tapes, the life written down in shorthand on legal pad. I am taking a moment for a breath of fresh air.

I am living in the coming Spring when I'm wearing a suit from Joseph Abboud. The shoes cost about as much as a medium-sized TV. I am living and working in the land of women, an untapped jacuzzi where the warmth of my words just might thrive. I had a long talk with an old new friend about the future. The circle that surrounds me will be unbreakable. This is just a moment. This is just my penance for forgetting who I was.

A year and some change ago I was complaining in the phone to a complete stranger. I was smoked-out and full of anger. I was certain that God had turned his back on me and that any kind of love was a Sunday morning when I was living in a Tuesday afternoon. Before I could continue I had to choke the life out of that former self. I had to watch the light leave his eyes, so that I could see fully through my own.

If I can pull this off for four more days I'll have my life back. Once I get my life back I can start to finish everything else. I am smelling the rubber burn during touchdown on the tarmac at National Airport. After this I'm getting home by any means necessary. End of line.

Ode to the NY/NJ Woman

2009-12-01T08:54:00.000-08:00

I've been on a Changing Faces binge for the last 24 hours. I'm not sure what set it off exactly, but it probably had to do with my current efforts to put my entire music library into ITunes so that I can make it completely portable. One disc and a single surfaced. Was I the biggest fan on the planet of the prettiest mouthpieces R. Kelly every put on a track? Not exactly. I respected their gangsta. But they were more of a guilty pleasure.

Looking back at their respectable three-album career I can say that what I appreciated most, long before I ever planted a flag there, was that they were fundamentally New York. They went to Hunter and John Jay. Their hair was unarguably Uptown/Brooklyn and they constantly songs from the point of view of the smart girl making stupid choices. My love affair with Cassandra and Charisse was quiet and demure, so much so that I almost forgot about it, until the music reminded me. Their cover of "Time After Time", however, was a gross overestimation of their singing ability.

Ever since I left home for college I was constantly mistaken for a New Yorker, even though I never hung with New York dudes or rocked their style. My accent is Southern, with enough DC in it to be recognized by the people of my hometown as one of their own.
Yet and still I was always drawn to its energy, even when it was a faraway city on television, a poster on the wall in my mother's TV room. My first time there, standing in 5 degree temperature on the steps of Columbia University, I somehow didn't mind it. I wanted the city to try it's best to take me down. I was always ready.

Enter the New York woman: cosmopolitan (even if it's only on the most hood of levels), immune to fears of large crowds, disgusting filth, and the travesty passed off as game that most of their local dudes spit. Nothing impresses her on the surface, but underneath shes as warm and gooey as any true Southern sweetheart. Their people are most either from my neck of the woods of the Caribbean. Diverse tastes in cuisine come with her territory. And she doesn't give a damn about what she has to do to see the man of her moment.

Of course I don't limit these traits to geography. And got more than enough issues with the designated breed. They are no less immune to getting on my nerves than any other soul with clashing viewpoints or a lack of common sense. But there's nothing like living catwalks that are subway platforms, a thousand sets of heels and boots clacking to the rhythm of rush hour three times a day. Everybody looks at everybody out here, probably for longer than makes me comfortable. But direct eye contact from a cutie on the platform at 42nd Street can be priceless.

As I power through someone else's book, anxiously waiting to get back to the next work of my own, I'm remembering just how much went down in those Brooklyn streets behind me. I remember the scent of a woman on sheets that weren't borrowed from someone else, the taste of wine in a shared glass, a kiss on still-sleeping cheek as she scurried off to work. It was so long ago that I swear it was someone else's life, a Baby Jessica trapped deep in a well of brighter memories that get harder and harder to reach, missing the skin I shed because it left me naked in a much colder world where the sun shines everyday.

But as I have a knack for not losing, I'll dismiss this moment as my standard lament before doing something I don't feel like doing, but has to be done. I've got a pot on the back burner that just might save my ass (if I can ever finish this tuna melt of a project). I just have to wait for it to be ready. I have to be ready for the next movement in this concerto of an 11th hour scribe. End of line.

The Grind (Part 2)

2009-11-28T22:42:00.000-08:00

Your biggest fear is that the recorded voices will follow you into your sleep. What I want to do is just write the damn thing, but when it's someone else's book you don't have that luxury. You have to make them happy. You have to make the dirt being dished palatable for the folks who worship syndicated DJs and celebrity journalism, both things I personally despise. Your craft doesn't matter as long as you name the right names and hand it in time for them to sell it at top dollar at the end of the rushed conveyor belt that is the "crash" production process.

No one will thank me for the work I do here, as I work for the very first time in this new place. No one will give me a pat on the back from 3000 miles away. All you get is an outline and a page count and all that you gathered from which to make your nest of a manuscript. Red tape has made it so that I won't have a free weekend almost until it's time to get out of here for Christmas.

Meanwhile things keep breaking around here in the new place. The refrigerator I spent hours cleaning after what appeared to be several presidencies worth of neglect, broke down. The new one, the cheapest model management could find but more than acceptable for a man who's learned how to work with almost anything, came in today. Now there's a leak in the sink next to the wash machine. And the dryer only makes this weird buzzing/grinding sound when I turn it on instead of drying my freshly-washed clothes. Someone said that space is remaking itself, kicking out the old to make way for the new.

I've barely had time to think about the implications of being freed from my 33rd year. There isn't that much room in my brain. For the rest of the weekend even a decent shot of whisky isn't in the budget, and somehow the Thanksgiving turkey that was so big when I put it in the fridge this afternoon has been picked down to nothing. I'm too tired to cook but I'm happy to be eating healthily.

I followed the yellow brick road to Oz only to learn that it was merely a station where I was to wait for a train to another circle of hell only slightly more pleasant than where I was before. I was supposed to be with my family for Turkey Day, as I havebeen for most years of my life, but I ended up dining with my LA friends and the man's life playing continuously at the back of my head.

I'm writing this blog so I can remember that I have a life outside of the particular field I'm tilling. The future looks bright as other business appears to be taking shape. I'm backstroking through hostile waters, looking up at the lights in the sky I often aim to reach. This is like living in a film with frames missing. I know how I started and I know where I get to, but the in between is a void that I have to wait to disappear.

I guess it wouldn't be fun if I knew the whole script. And I'm sure that somewhere deep inside I'm eager to rise to the challenge of doing so much in a short period of time. It's another feather in my headband. Hopefully one day I'll have enough of them to be chief. End of line.

Rewind

2009-11-24T09:08:00.000-08:00

The young brother working as a bus boy asks me how the night went. I tell him it was cool. He's maybe 21 or 22. I don't think the Black folks who come here say hello. He's happily surprised when I ask him his name. I get this strange feeling that I'll run into him again.

Only in LA would one stumble across a 1930s costume party on a Monday night. The lights come up at the SLS Hotel. Last call is long gone. The night is through. 12 hours before I banged out 14 pages in four hours, the first leg of a 20-day run that I will never attempt to do again. I am Atlas carrying the burden of a book that is not there. But it will be, as rent is always due.

Moving back in time I'm at Dragonfly on Santa Monica meeting a friend of a friend for an art show and music showcase. A skinny, curly mop headed front man throws himself around the stage as the song comes to a climax. An artist paints a portrait of a woman on a red ship atop blue seas. I watch a pair of legs cross from the other side of the room. My tastes are changing with my times.

It's three days after my birthday and I'm taking stock of the year that has just passed. Standing in the face of a new place where crafts and talents must be honed once more, I perhaps got my wish of being a nowhere man, of being in a place without short-term memory. What I did before no longer exists. So I gotta do it again.

Hopped up on the 2 liter of Coke that got me through the grind on three hours sleep I needed to breath air outside of this compound. To sit in a bar where silent films are show on screens under transparent tabletops, a brass menorrah in glass in the lobby, I'm kinda liking this moment. Here and now I'm kind of thinking that the sun will shine for me here. I keep surprising myself.

My godsister's houseguest made salmon and shrimp with okra and peppers. Heroes was halfway decent. I'm sad about the fact that I won't see my family for Turkey Day and that my sister will turn 15 without me. A blog reader on Facebook tells me to hang in there. I appreciate the words. God is good.

To think that I woke up yesterday morning full of doom and gloom, a little engine that could stalled out from doubt. But God spoke to me through a friend who said to only worry about the immediate task at hand. The beauty of the future is that you can always deal with it later.

Commando

2009-11-20T10:10:00.000-08:00

A year ago today I found myself surrounded my entire family. I had my parents, my sisters, uncles, Grandma and even my Cousin Cordelia from down the country. There were crab legs and cake and wine and gin. We laughed and smiled and felt the energy of being as one. That hadn't happened in a long time. I thought that it was really something special. I had no idea of how true that was.

All through a hellish 33 I found myself clinging to that first night of my year, as the many things said and done there were the ledges I held onto when it felt like I was sure to fall. I thought it was going to be another case of blowing into town and making things happen fast. And they did. But fast in LA equates to a lifetime of New York minutes.

Here nobody says what they mean and the money comes last. Here intelligence is valued as much as a hump in the spine. Yet and still I stayed the course. There may not have been platinum but I've formed some precious friendships, folks who will help me get to where I need to go. It took me almost a year but I'm writing this blog from my own bedroom, through the creature comfort of wireless is only there to help me get this job done.

I feel like couch potato who just went through boot camp. Disregarding my wounds was the only way I could make it to the goal line. No lips to kiss my bruises out here, no safehouses to give me shelter from the war ahead. I've had to remember steps I didn't think I would need anymore. I've had to rely on God more than anything and anyone else. If He/She has disappointed its only been because I didn't understand the full plan.

There were so many things I took for granted, so many uncomfortable worlds that I needed to know and understand. I had to learn how to wait without watching the clock(Still learning that one actually). I had to learn how to sacrifice for the things I wanted, and to hold on until it felt like my fingers were going to snap.
My reasons for doing it are different than what a lot of people would think.
If I didn't go I couldn't come back home.

I'm trying to get into living here. I will called the fish guy at the supermarket by his first name. I need to explore the Farmer's Markets. I need to go on a date that doesn't feel like an Ashton Kutcher concoction. I want to believe what my higher self tells me all the time. But then again he knows that the rest of me is more hard-headed than two Tauruses and John McClain with a helmet on.

In the movie version of this I would have touched down at JFK last night. The Dervish and I would've had dinner, Me, Rich and the Chrises would be on for drinks around eight. Then I was gonna take the boys and girls up to Sin City in the Bronx, then Saturday night a Casa de Seda playing Jenga and floating amongst the ckouds of Brooklyn City. I dreamed a dream, but that one's long gone.

Even if I know how this chapter ends, I have to live the story to get to its conclusion, which means letting go of my plan and letting ""the plan" take shape. It's how I ended up in this crib in a part of town where I never planned to plant stakes. But this is where I'm needed. So this is where I am. 'Nuff said.

I want to flirt with someone tonight. I'll tell her that I'm a teacher or life coach or an editor when they ask. None of these are lies, but they'll shadow my selling points well enough for me to see what's really behind her curious eyes. I might drink a glass of Macallan. Or I could settle for Jameson. Either way it'll be the beginning of a brand new journey, footprints on a snowy mountain that I'll never cross again. I'm heading back to the world. They don't know what's about to hit them.

The Healer

2009-11-16T11:03:00.001-08:00

It's just another day in the hood as I stand in front of the Baldwin Hills Library on just another Friday afternoon. My eyes scan the perimeter and the traffic approaching in both directions. He's late. But so am I. I hope the exchange is still going down.

This is my first excursion as a bagman. My sister's new roommate left his cellphone unattended at a library computer terminal and was quickly relieved of it. I texted the phone with a message that there was a cash reward for it's return. Later that night someone texts back and says they bought it from a guy on the street and want to return it for what he paid.

I agree, knowing that the man I'm playing proxy for lacks the "negotiation ability" needed to have this switch go off without a hitch. The phone has crucial numbers in it he needs, hence his willingness to pay the price.

A new text comes in. Parking lot side of the building. Be alone. I have backup waiting just beyond the sight line of the parking lot entrance, just in case. A minivan filled with five Mexican teenagers pulls in front of me.

The window rolls down. They are nervous but trying not to show it, seemingly more worried about the whole thing than I was. I give them the dough. They give me the phone. And I'm on my way to my next, crucial appointment.

I remove my shoes at the door, as I'm sure is custom. There is sage in the air. A relaxation CD plays, jumping from a track with the sounds of a forest, to one of the ocean. I am told to disrobe. I go down to my boxers and get under the towel. She tells me to relax.

I don't tell her much about myself to learn as he uses fingers and hands, arms, knees and elbows to push the toxins out of the many knots in my flesh, some in places I could not feel on my own. But she shows me.

"A lot of stress," she says, making note. Tell me about it.

I can feel her working hard, but it's not painful. The shea butter, oils and other liquids she uses turn it into an astral experience. I take a step away from the sensations to study how she works. My lungs clog with mucus that needs to leave me. She gives me tissues and water. My eyes are comfortably closed all the while.

"I know you're a helper," she comments. "Relax and let me help you."

I see flashes of what could be peacock feathers, and a forest, a reflection of myself in the mirror that seems weathered and worn, almost crazed. As the body is relieved so are it's concerns. Two hours melts away like two minutes. This is my first massage of this kind. I feel like I need a cigarette, or at the very least another hour a lounge in the effects. I savor every moment, dreading the beeping alarm that says the session is over.

It takes a few moments for me to stand. I forget about the cellphone handoff. I forget about bills due and dough expected. I don't see the deadline speeding towards me or the fear that 34 will be as difficult as 33. There is just the sage and the music and this sense of being somewhere outside of the world, before I got back into it.

"Thank for you allowing me to take care of your body," she says.

I glance up at drawing of the woman taken a god 20 or 30 years before. Her fair skin still has few wrinkles. The girl in the picture has cornrows. The woman has a blown-out fro. Ain't much changed in the life of this healer. I can't say I know that for myself. But I feel it.

On the road ahead many will seek my help. Far more will need than those who will have to give. Not unlike the woman before me I will have to take my time. I'll have to limit the number of clients I can handle. I'll have to feel my way through solving problems, relieving stress and changing the game.

She tells me to come and see her once a month, which is easy as she lives at the end of my street, a direct line to God right at the corner. I'll be using it regularly.
End of line.

Ice Cream

2009-11-12T12:18:00.000-08:00

I am standing before a diverse crowd of faces: black and white, twenty-something to sixty-something, all there before myself, four other contributors and Meri Danquah, my friend and the author/editor who brought us together for The Black Body anthology, a collection of creative nonfiction essays on the titled theme.

In under ten minutes I go from describing the first time I ever copped a feel in science class to breaking down the sociopolitical implications of the world's perceptions of Black women in terms of their behinds. I get a lot of laughs and good praise. I get invited to speak at a college. I sign the book of a tall curly redhead from Dublin and a sista from LA I haven't seen in 12 years.

It's my first public appearance as author in LA. Here I'm not the manny or the craft services guy or the PA. Here, in these moments, I feel for the first time in a long time like I've done something with my life that I can be proud of.

On the way home my Ipod takes me to a track I haven't heard in years. I love Sarah McLachlan. This cut, "Ice Cream", was on the one album of hers I didn't own, the one I inherited from a love gone awry, the last one, which feels so much further away than it actually is.

With enough time away from it I now recognize that its beauty rested in the inevitability of its failure. Like Neo and Trinity we were both destined to give up our love life in the name of things that were more important to each of us. We had an inoperable aneurysm that I kept trying to fix, refusing to accept the fact that God had a much different plan.

The beauty of it was that it helped me to understand what I wanted from what I didn't get. It was also a lesson that knowing the future doesn't mean you can change it. I was hard-headed about that one for a long time and it cost me. Luckily it was a price within my journey's budget.

So I paid. Shields went up. The knob on my phaser went to 'kill'. If I was gonna go out the whole world was going with me. Needed surgery is painful as shit but it saves lives.

For two minutes and 44 seconds I remember the illusion of being home, Odysseus back in Ithaca with his wife and child. Then I woke up back on that long desert road to keep on walking farther than neither Cece nor Nancy Sinatra had ever expected. Had I been a DJ back a decade ago I would've gotten Raekwon to put Sarah on his "Ice Cream"'s remix. Perhaps I'll blend on it on my own on some lazy afternoon as I glimpse at the mausoleum down at the bottom of the dead sea that gave us new life. Love is neither created nor destroyed. It just is. End of line.

The Appetizer (from Intercourse, coming in Summer 2010)

2009-11-10T15:36:00.000-08:00

I was almost eighteen when I met Nasrene within the incense-heavy cloud of a place called Dejoulle African on Cascade Road. I came armed with a “best of” selection of poems, which were all I was writing for public consumption at the time.

I was one of the last readers of the evening. So I was happy for the little applause that I got. The club’s closing tradition involved standing in a circle, holding hands, and repeating a mantra (which I’ve long since forgotten). When in Rome I do as is custom. When the circle shattered she was standing there, a pure chocolate goddess standing 5’8 high. She had on these silver frames with no glass in them and a long crocheted dress that looked like something fresh out of Woodstock. She listened as I spoke to others giving me praise. She was waiting for me.

I walked her back to the front gate at Spelman. It turned out she was from a town not far from my own. A day later we’re sitting under the tree next to the student parking lot. Using a pencil, she sketched my face on a big pad. She wanted to know me. She wanted to be with me. I wanted to be with her. It had never and would never be that simple again.

It was only a few days later that she led up the two flights of stairs to her dorm room. During the single hour (out of two semesters) that I managed to pry my roommate from the other side of my room, she had swallowed me whole with the trifecta of force, rhythm and endurance. It was my first time and the moment where I definitely understood why so many dudes hailed the blowjob as the best experience of their young lives.

The grin on her face those few days later had been both shy and mischievous. I was afraid to touch her. I didn’t want to mess it up. I didn’t want to make mistakes. It was both nothing and everything like what I had imagined, not the self-serving act captured in present-day porn, but a flood of warmth and intensity that had taken me beyond the known universe for six minutes of pleasure. I was in love. But that, however, had been a mere prelude to the real deal.

I had been hard from the moment she scribbled the question on a slip of paper and handed it to me just as my roommate reentered the room. It read: “Do you want to have sex?”

We couldn’t get to her dorm fast enough.

I remember the way she smelled as she wiggled her panties over an ass God had taken with. A single drop of wetness ran down the inside of her thigh. I did a double take. She couldn’t have been that turned on already.
She dropped Janet’s Janet into the changer and “Throb” burst through the speakers as she pulled me on top of her. Her tongue deliciously knotted with mine before it traveled into various unchartered territory.

Her hands and her lips and her feet and her ass were a well-oiled machine that I tried to drive pro, even though I barely had a learner’s permit. She was in total control, even though I was the one on top. I tried to create a rhythm, moving in time with her hips. I wanted to have absolutely nothing in common with the subject of BWP’s famed classic, “Two-Minute Brother”.

And I didn’t. As a matter of fact it went on for far longer than even she would have wanted.. Some kind of way she came, and if she didn’t, her performance, complete with moaning and trembling, was worthy of critical acclaim.

We pushed and pulled until the hourglass ran out on male visitation. Then we danced the night away at Dejoulle, on the same floor where we’d met not long before.

The next day she brought a Tupperware container filled with rotini and marinara. The sauce was sugary sweet as she fed it to me under a streep lamp in the parking lot outside of my dorm. I could tell that she’d put a lot into it. She wanted our meal to matter.

In the weeks that followed she would give me a private class in Intercourse 101, a series of nightly expeditions into all that the dudes back home claimed to know about, but most likely did not.

My biggest regret is that I didn’t get to cook for her in those days, that timing and circumstance made it impossible to express my appreciation for her many gifts. Even when I saw her the last time, just before she married one of the truly good guys, I know that she still cares, as do I. That’s what love is.

Pieces of A Dream

2009-11-09T10:39:00.000-08:00

I spent my night watching the same documentary over and over. The work of the artist himself, the flick holds the keys to what I'm looking for, a framework upon which the book can be built. In this case the hours of tape and the shorthand, and all the things I've scribbled into the corners of countless lined pages over the course of the last two or three weeks can only help me once I see the story through and through. I'm still putting together the pieces, still trying to make this puzzle work.

I am no longer undercover. As a matter of fact I feel as if I'm standing naked with nothing but the truth to keep me warm. Because in this case the truth doesn't matter. In this case sex and violence painted with the candy coating of clout go down like just another pull prescribed for the ever-sickening American psyche. I, yet again, am the harbinger of death for good reading, or at least a reluctant cog in the only machine that's cutting me a check at this point. Cest la vie.

I keep waiting for someone to walk into my place. It's not that I'm preoccupied by security concerns as much as I am still working hard to grasp the fact that I have a place that is completely my own again. No one else's alarm clock. No longer am I subject to other people's bedtimes, kitchen rules and the sounds of other people's intercourse through walls too thin. Now all I need is some furniture.

I will paint in between writing and write in between bouts of painting and furniture buying. I'll need a U-haul on retainer, or at least a planned day or snatching up as much furniture off of craigslist as time and money will allow. It's all a part of the process I guess, all a part of starting over.

But now that I feel like I'm getting over the hump I'm back to figuring out what in the hell I'm doing this for, why my life has been reduced to some living parable that didn't manage to make the good book. I still dream of being a simpler man with simpler goals. I still wish that I were driven by the same trivial pursuits that keep most moving around the board. I hope that unclogging the garbage disposal will be relatively simple. But even if it ain't, I'll find a way to make it work.

I'm not fortunate enough to say that I'm at the end of anything. At best I've gotten through one security checkpoint just to end up in line at the next. But there is a plane taking off with my name on it. I just have to get there. And I'm closer than I was yesterday. End of line.

The Death of The Remix (As I Knew It)

2009-11-03T13:50:00.001-08:00

As my 34th birthday approaches, I have come to full grips that I am just about out of the target demographic for all things young and hip, or at least the group of folks who that spend the most money on entertainment products. I no longer dwell in places where promo flyers and mixtapes land in youthful hands in hopes that we will purchase whatever the latest audiovisual offering might be. And for me, this is a good thing.

As I recently moved in the first place of my own I've had in over a year, what I took with me on my Exodus west had mostly remained in sealed boxes. These boxes held the few things that I didn't sell, giveaway or leave at the crossroads of Hancock and Nostrand for the world to have its way with. I chose a good 300 CDs out of a collection that was well over 1000, the spoils of working as a music journalist and proof that once upon a time I was a true insider. But as I've said repeatedly, purging is a good thing.

As I've added each disc to my Itunes drive in the name of portability, I've found myself running into a large numbers of CD singles with various b-sides, something which wasn't so much of a rarity a decade ago. As a matter of fact it was expected for any real fan out there.

Back then rappers and producers would step in a studio to attack the same beat with new verses, or the same verses with a new beat. Sometimes cats got so crazy with it that you barely recognized the song at all. The beauty was in the looking and finding as many of these tracks were promos used to push the sales of that artist's current album. It was remixes that allowed groups like The Fugees, Common, Method Man, Busta Rhymes, and countless other artists to maintain a hold on the listening spotlight when their original records didn't deliver commercially, creatively or both.

But such remixes, as were, are now a thing of hip hop history. It saddens me that with the state of the game, which I like to view as that Thanksgiving turkey on day four, nearly picked completely to the bone of its true treasures, the younger generation gets such a diminished version of the spontaneity and originality that was the very heart of what we were listening to. Very few new artists actually freestyle, and the age of the superproducer has created a monolithic sound that very few in the short list of codified genres deviate from.

This isn't to say that folks don't still come with it. I've been impressed by the work of new artists ranging from Drake, Rihanna and T.I. to subterranean folks like The Kids in the Hall, Blu, and the Justus League. Still I buy new stuff less and less. And when I do it's from artists whose work I know well.

I find myself looking backwards more and more, trying to snatch up as many of the tracks that made me lose it as a teen and college kid. I think Jigga said it best just after he took over Def Jam when asked how he felt about music today. His response said that nothing is like the music of your youth, no matter how good what is current might be.

I'm proud to have far more of what was released in those days than most of my peers. And with Itunes I manage to pinch a little more from all my music head homies. I'll never stop play and I'll never stop exploring. But as what's in the rearview gets further away, I still need to reach back every once in awhile, while I can still touch it, while it still feels real. End of line.

The Real Cougartown

2009-11-02T12:15:00.000-08:00

I've been in town less than 24 hours. I've spent all my time moving into the new crib. But there are other things to do. I have a commitment I need to honor, the launch and booksigning for The Black Body, my friend and author Meri Danquah's new anthology called The Black Body, of which I am a part.

I have a knack for ending up in places where I'm not supposed to be. But when I get there I usually find a way to make myself at home. So when my homegirl had to stop through a baby shower in Beverly Hills on our way to a booksigning in Hollywood, I was expecting to sit in the back, keep my mouth shut and help myself to whatever food and/or liquor was being offered.

I had been to showers before, those bubbling springs of female energy designed to welcome new lives and loves into circles of friends and family. I knew it would be "girly". I knew there would be little that I would find interesting to talk about. I was only half right. When I stepped into a room of beautiful women 35 and over, dressed in their best after 5 gear and on their way to being plastered from Prosecco, I was far less anxious to get where we were going.

Forget about Courtney Cox. This was the real Cougartown.

I look for a seat in the back somewhere, but the hostess quickly sandwiches me between Lisa, the long-legged blonde white girl, and the 6 foot 2 chocolate Amazon who casually announces that she has a boyfriend when I happen to make a note that the last thing she needs is breast implants.

"They fill out a halter top well," she says.
"God knows what he's doing," I said.

I check her profile when she stands up. I'm surprised she doesn't tip backwards. It makes me even more certain that my words were the right ones.

The lone white girl is from Connecticut so she goes with the East Coast idle chatter angle. The bride to be refers to me only as "strange man", her sarcastic way of admitting that she'd rather not have me there.

The lady of the house keeps refilling my glass and smiling, her assets well-pronounced in a satiny evening number and heels and show off just enough of everything.

I quickly give in to my alcohol-fueled imagination.

Cut to Barney's after the 5G shopping spree she swipes the card for while the tailor checks the hems on my brand new Armani suit. I'm whipping her ride when I pick her up from meetings. I'm drinking Blue Label in my home because it doesn't seem as expensive anymore. And I'm drowning in the beautiful disaster of trying to keep up with a woman at her sexual peak.

All I need is about six weeks in the gym to make the package complete. The writing racket becomes a semi-frivolous hobby as there's always cash in my account and a passport with more stamps than it can hold. Whoring myself out has never felt this good. I imagine her undressing in front of me for the very first time, exposing to the miracles of black never cracking and the importance of personal training.

When I pop back into reality women are tagging notes on a corkboard to commemorate their friendships with the bride to be. I shake hands and introduce myself to folks. I get business cards as these ladies are the perfect audience to host a reading/exhibition for my cookbook. By the time we get out of there, there's enough of a buzz on for me to be glad I'm out of range.

But my sis leaves her jacket. And I leave my bag. So we gotta take it back like Aaliyah when she was married to the pedophile in the purple mask. We arrive again just as the now bona fide drunk circles is beginning to break. I take a seat as sis gets into a convo. My dream cougar stares at me again with a smile.

"You're so cute," she smiles. I blush so much that I turn purple. And with the diamond the size of a fist on her hand, that's about as close as I'm going to get.

We hop into the Mustang and head south back to the new compound, an empty shell reading to be filled with new life and plenty of space to be remade on our own terms.
End of line.

Almost Home

2009-10-30T07:37:00.000-07:00

I'm a big enthusiast about the human mind, one of the greatest organic machines created by the folks upstairs. In a little less than 36 hours I'll return to Hell-A with 40 hours of tape, a composition book and a half full of notes, and an intensive deadline, which I intend to slaughter with the zeal of Arnold in the last act of Commando. But it's not just about that. It's also about letting go.

While confessing to all the miracles and blessings that have kept me alive during some of the toughest years of my life, I learned that I wasn't wrong about so many things that I've observed beneath the surface, that our rules and concerns and senses of order matter about as much as an arrest in a child's game of cops and robbers. I have found myself standing in shoes with my parents' names on them, adjusting to the way they've been worn so that what remains doesn't wear out from the bottom before this long walk is over.

After eleven days the masks in front of my clients have begun to slip. I have gotten glimpses of the people a world hated, now older and diminished. But the heart of it all is still the same. It wasn't until my flight out was booked that I started to see what my job was. I needed to make their version of the truth real. That's what I'm getting paid for. That's it and that's all.

I tossed a ball back and forth with a four-year old late last night. His father works security for my clients. He keeps a straight face most of the time, trying hard to mask the weaknesses in his mind and spirit. His little boy doesn't seem to know how to laugh or smile. No one tickles or plays with him. He's growing up thinking that the gangster frown on his face is what's expected. And the circle he's within', one of men who know guns and drugs, parole, probation and varying degrees of misogyny, will teach him that this is what he's supposed to be like.

I remember the education that I got from older boys in the hood who didn't know any better. It was my father's job to deprogram me on a nightly basis, to show me the many worlds both above and beneath this planet we call home. And it was worth far more than the designer clothes he would never buy me. I thought everybody go twhat I had. Talk about naivete'.

I feel for that little kid. I feel like he's already been robbed of his innocence even before the last of my own has dissolved into the sea where I will be born again, sooner than later.

I don't think I've ever missed home this much, not the place where I was born, or the one where I became a man, but the four walls and mattress that only I have the key to, conversations not interrupted by other voices and points of concern.

I keep hearing the same things about myself. These are good things, things that remind of why I endured the unbridled storm that blew my life into a million little pieces, an act of God that helped me begin to see what truly mattered. End of line.

She, Her and Everybody In Between

2009-10-26T07:14:00.000-07:00

I am currently writing a cookbook/memoir about love/lust and food. The words come quickly. The stories are still fresh. I remember making curry chicken with pigeon peas for a little thing the fellas and I put together for the West Indian Day Parade nine months into my very first year in Brooklyn. That night I had my first rum and coke. That night we partied through the rain. Everything was so new. It all made so much sense.

We were broke, far poorer than most of us have ever been since. But we knew how to have a good time. The thing all three of us wanted were women who really understood us. Night after night we made our way through clubs and house parties, to gatherings, cultural events and cafe. Women weren't always at the front of our minds, but they were lingering there. So many venues. So many choices. It seemed as if it could have gone on forever. But six months in K popped the question to his new lady and went down for the count. And then there were two.

It would take a good four or five years for Wood to get caught in the net and go down willingly, while I was falling in love every other year, putting my both heart and genitals on the line each and every time I got the right recognition from the perfect pair of eyes. When each ticking time bomb went off, I hopped right on the fast track towards the next one. I kept thinking that it was something I'd done in the execution. But it was in the planning where the problem rested.

The answer came to me within the midst of chaos, the crumbling tower where I kept getting concussions from the glass ceiling up above. It took many nights commiserating with my homeboy Ralph (who just tied the knot his damn self) for me to see what had eluded me for so long. And it was right in front of my face. I isolated it. Then I dealt with it. Then I saw that the real problem was the way I was both seeing and choosing not to see the choices I'd made along the way.

Now here, sitting before the blue-green sea that was and is our very first mirror, I understand more than ever that I often sold myself short. I took less than I deserved just so that I could go home with a plate. I now know what I was missing, the train I kept waiting for that never came.

I often feel like much of my life has been spent learning the lessons that eluded my parents at this same point in their lives. I'm a little better at taking cues from the Director upstairs. I'm in a little less in a hurry to get to the front of the line when I don't know what they're serving yet.
End of line.

Slippin'

2009-10-23T11:11:00.000-07:00

There's a moment that I dread. What makes it even worse if that this particular moment comes to me daily. Sometimes it arrives when my up-close and personal sessions as derailed by collar pulls to the side or the being ushered a car or room or area that takes me away from a life in motion.

Sure it comes with the territory. Sure, I'm under no illusions that we're doing what we're doing in the name of combination of commerce, necessity and the mutually beneficial. But once you get to waking up in someone else's place, day after day (with more days to go), you start thinking about home and what your people are doing in whichever place. I also have to remind myself that I'm just the fly on the wall here.

We're all in a room discussing hip hop. The artist who has just left the mic argues against The Woman's statement that Jeezy is the best rapper coming out of Atlanta. No one questions that he trumps T.I. But when the young buck in the room says he thinks Andre 3000 is the best of them all, what comes back is a statement that tries me.

She says that she was never impressed by 'Dre, whose work I often think of building a shrine around. She says that Outkast stole their flow from a combo of Treach and Das Efx, that they were just something "the college kids" wanted to be different. She uses this terminology a lot, that the world is made up of "street niggas" and "college kids", as if there are only two groups of us, plain and simple. I bite my tongue until it bleeds. This is not the time for me to get on my soap box, because my voice carries heavier than any else present.

Something about this moment that reminds me of my camouflage. I made a focused decision to exclude the gym shirt from college, my 'Black Nerds Unite' shirt, my DC Public Library giveaway tee and anything else that might beat her over the head with who I am in the day to day, because "he" is on hiatus until this part of the job is over. I've done it in plenty of other spaces and places, but never for this long, never this intently. My reasons are strictly strategic. And thus far, from what I have on tape, I'm doing the right thing. But this isn't the real challenge. The big hump to get over is writing 300 pages in six weeks. But I've been there before.
This is something different.

If anything, these little moments add some kick to the life story when it' finally told. It's the uncertainty that makes the payoff so sweet when you're sitting amongst your fans and they ask you how you did it. How did you survive? What motivated you?
What keeps you going from day to day?

My answer would be everything and nothing. Words can't make it any more or less real. It just is. It's all about living through these little moments, the ones that can lead you astray if you're not careful.

In this new life I try to look at the world with both eyes open. I often see the things I fear most more clearly than the price of my ticket. I wonder why when it comes to me it's always about the second time around. Was it the world or me who missed it when I took that first shot? End of line.

Go Under. Stay Under.

2009-10-21T13:46:00.000-07:00

You have to become one of them and you have to become her. This is perhaps the most important rule when writing someone else's memoir. As the outside man, you have to find your way into the circle of trust, with your subject, with the environment, and most of all with the gray areas and minutia of someone else's life. As writer you control few of the story points, but you do get to determine how the story is told. You live it and breathe it, especially on this tight leash of a deadline. Ready. Set. Go.

Remaining in the mode above 24/7 sounds perfect on paper. But in reality you miss your bed, your friends, the new place you have to decorate, the cookbook to work on, the short to shoot, the script drop to get so that you can keep it all, you don't get away from it. You're life is there, in this block of ice, to be thawed only after the current phase is completed.

Every morning the ocean beyond the terrace is a different color of blue-green. Yet the routine is the same. To the studio around 4pm. Leave around 3am. People come by. People leave. An engineer gets fired. Weed is smoked in ludicrous amounts. It's brought in daily by three different dealers. One is in culinary school. One makes beats. And the last guy looks like he's been eating trailing mix and tofu for the last 20 years. Go figure.

I enjoy the health-damaging pleasure of pizza and takeout from local greasy spoons while my recorder records. I think and frame, taking notes in shorthand my reporter mentors would be impressed by. I go to sleep late and wake up later. I meet men who made music that's important to me. I watch a tiny dog actually go to the bathroom in a bathroom. I smile a lot because it's all strangely silly, a soap opera I'm scripting to the beats of 808s and synthesized horns. But I like it.

Though my daydreams are repainting the walls and choosing just the right flat-screen for my hermit moments, throwing the sickest New Years Party Mid-City has ever seen, I am on the hunt for answers within the words and actions of a woman a world both loves and fears. It's a job after all, the only one I'm any good at. End of line.

Sea of Tranquility

2009-10-20T06:23:00.000-07:00

I used to be part of a world where no one came alive before 9am. We were children of the night, documenting the triumph of the human spirit within a world of turntables, mics and egos. The liquor was almost always free, but there was a still a price. I had seen the end of a world coming before doom appeared on the horizon, but that didn't mean a piece of my heart wasn't still there.

After a long hiatus I am now running with a pack of my own kind for awhile. The game may not be the same but so many of its rituals will never change.

I am the first one up in this house. I do sun salutations on the terrace in the light of the newly-risen sun. The sounds of the blue-green Atlantic and a nearby pile driver are the only soundtrack. I have been trying to get to a place like this for months, somewhere free of the prison-like rules of my new world. So many times I've just wanted to quiet, just enough peace for me to remember how it used to go, so I can do it again. Yoga, calisthenics, bikings, meditation, the list goes on...

I am re-soldering the connection between selves high and low. I inhale the freshly-squeezed sunlight and exhale the darkness absorbed within the desperate hours spent in places where men with nothing to lose do it one more time. I have been here before and loved it. Then I hated it. Then the waves pushed into currents that let me to another shore altogether.

This is finishing old business. This is saying goodbye to a boy who knows that Santa Claus is a pipe dream but still wants to leave the milk and cookies one last time.

In the hour before the storm I work on my own stuff, this blog, that cookbook, the script I'm doing for that dude back in LA. I like the deadlines. I like the pressure. When I'm in their throes I understand why God put me here: because I'm strong enough to take it. End of line.

Miami Life

2009-10-19T05:14:00.000-07:00

I am in the guest room of a condo 15 stories above Miami's South Beach. The sectioned window stretches from the marble floor to the ceiling. The furniture is spotless, the sign of regular and consistent housekeeping by a paid professional. Bottom line: There is money here. If there was no money, I wouldn't have gotten the job.

I have less than two months to make my deadline. But as this is my first full-length assignment for hire in almost two years and I'm dead in the middle of a recession I'm just happy to be here. I have 14 days to get what I need. Then I'll head back to the lodge and bang out a manuscript.

I've been all over Florida but never to Miami. While LA is the seat of glam and excess, Miami comes a close second. While the botox and salines levels are just about even, this place feels more passionate and diverse. I think of the the Latino children waiting for their father who gathered around my laptop to watch the latest episode of Clone Wars, the casual sways of feminine hip in tight fabric, the various shades of brown toasted by the constant sunshine. From my morning view this city seems to stretch on forever. Though I'm here for the job I'm still craving a taste of Miami life, something that I'll savor when it's time to go back to Hell for another little while.

I have no idea how this is going to go as I navigate the terrain. I'm remembering the outline of a dream that once sat next to me in the old place. I was foolish enough to think that she could save me from this choke point between two extremes. But that was just a quick moment on the expressway to here, a moment that apparently mattered far less than I thought it did. The road to Nirvana is a one-player game. And I think I'm finally about to get to the next level. End of line.

The Girl (Wednesday)

2009-10-16T14:46:00.000-07:00

I am on my first MTA ride in two months. With all the complaining New Yorkers do about the trains I didn't think that I'd miss the subterranean tubes once they were gone from my day to day. But there's something calming about the whistling sound the airs makes around the iron horse marked A as it heads from Manhattan to Brooklyn. At the left end of the car, a group of middle aged men sing in four-part harmony. To my right there is...her.

Believe it or not I have known her since kindergarten. She was Takia Martin's homegirl who always work the black satin baseball jacket promoting some kind of extracurricular activity. She would have been eight then, her light brown hair contsrained into two long braids draped down her back. I never said a word to her. As a matter of fact I completely forgot her...until we ended up in junior high together.

She was a year ahead of me there. Her asymmetrical mushroom bob hung low past her shoulders, replacing those braids. She was tall and slender, like a model. I would watch her from time to time, the way she moved, the way she smiled. I didn't get it though. She wasn't my type. But we did share a history and a neighborhood. We took the V5 bus home every other day. And still we never spoke.

Jump ahead another three years and I'm seeing her on the quad near Lower Manley at Spelman. She still looks the same. In a social world where hugs are a general platonic greeting I have never been close enough to know how she smells. This is as strange to me as the whole affair. I only see her every once in awhile as my college world is not hers. She quickly becomes her usual slightly-less than a memory. Life goes on.

Seven years later she's viewing the house for sale across the street from my ex-lady friend's. It's on the other side of the avenue from my crib. I am baffled by this. It doesn't keep me up at night but I still wonder who the connection is. Why do we keep ending up in the same place at the same time?

A year ago I stop her on the street after parking the car I'm sitting. I introduce myself. She doesn't remember me. I tell her the whole story: all that we have in common, all of the same ground that both of us have managed to cover. The look on her face is blank. None of it registers. But she's polite and relatively warm. Her voice is still as soft and feminine as I remember it from words I've overheard.

But that's it. I go my way. She goes hers. We give each other the nod on opposite side of the ave.

Now she's there again, her still skinny self wrapped in a trenchcoat that makes her look even skinnier. She never even looks in my direction. I am there but I am not there.

While I'm a believer in coincidence I feel that this is something else. As I'm relatively certain that I've lived other lives I wonder if she was part of one, a heart I may have broken, a soul I might have torched on the way to my own private Nirvana between a more appropriate set of thighs, the mother of children I no longer remember, the wife of a man I no longer am.

Perhaps this is my torture for some past indiscretion, for someone who might have once been the center of my world to see through me instead what's right there. I'm probably being dramatic but that doesn't mean that the truth underneath the sappy surface isn't real.

It's another thing I can't explain in a world overflowing with unsolved riddles and mysteries, Sudoku with four dimensions and a trap door at the bottom. Thus I've stopped trying, and starting living, by Their rules, and not just my own. End of line.

Little Things (Saturday)

2009-10-15T14:13:00.000-07:00

For more than seven years I have made twice-annual visits to the cleaners at Fulton just past Brooklyn Avenue. That busy little shop serves as home to a motley crew of folks who could all use customer service lessons. When I am there it is undoubtedly to have my dress clothes cleaned, which only come out of the closet a few times a year, usually for weddings, speaking gigs or the occasional trip to somebody’s church. No one ever says hello to me. Instead there’s a simple look that can loosely be translated as “What you want?” Sometimes I don’t know how or why I fell in love with the Rotten Apple, as so much of it offended my daily social sensibilities.
I lay out a wrinkled Donna Karan suit jacket, which I have owned since the year my first book was published (I’m rather pleased to say it still fits). I haven’t worn it in two years and somehow during the exodus west it ended up mashed into the bottom of a bag of clothes. It’s Saturday and my man Ralph’s wedding is on Sunday. I ask Ms. Personality if she can clean it by days end. She shakes her head.
“There’s stains on it,” she says in an undeniably rural Jamaican accent, her words making it somehow worse. I tell her to press it, that I’ll get whatever it is out when it comes back. The truth is that I have no idea whether that’s possible. She takes the garment and give me a ticket. I tell her I’ll be back at closing.
I almost forget about the jacket as I’m posted up watching flicks with The Dervish down in Clinton Hill. My sleep-deprived mind sorts through lists of contacts and folks that I should see. But this far the days have gotten the best of me. My New York minutes always run out so quickly. It’s why I fell in love with her at first sight. She, as city, never bores me.
When I return to the cleaners I get back a jacket free of stains. It even appears to have been cleaned. The same clerk, who I now see as a middle-aged woman with grown children, someone who has forsaken liking her job in favor of having and keeping one, is there before me. She does not grin, or wink, or give me any indication that she’s done something special. She just did, because it needed doing.
That’s the beauty about the best of women in the world. They show their love in all kinds of ways, from eating your food (even if they don’t particularly like it) to putting you in your place when you need it, to making sure that you don’t show up at your boy’s wedding looking like a complete slob.
It makes me understand my mother all the more. Me getting the creases right when I ironed my church lacks meant the whole church would know that she’d raised me right. Time shows you a lot more in the second quarter of the game, the one which I’m only beginning to play. End of line.

Fridays

2009-10-02T22:50:00.000-07:00

Long before Craig and Smokey there were J-Thrill, Spot and LP, three dope rappers from Detroit (aka "The D") who made a song together. It never made the radio. It didn't even end up on a mixtape of any kind. Done over a holiday break from college in '94, the track, produced by Spot(who introduced me to the original from which Tribe's "Find a Way" was born), the song was an ode to my favorite day of the week.

Three boy-men delved into three different versions of the Johnny Kemp thing. The hook was primarily composed of a young man humming to himself. I even remember pieces of the verses. Thrill had a line about how the only sweet potato pie he ate came on a place. Spot had a part where he said: "So I AT&T a homie-friend lovin' me down/like Brandy she's gonna be down..." followed by an ode to the classic walk of shame in the morning. It's my favorite song I'll never hear again, as the master was lost forever.

For awhile it was my thing to roll two Ls. I'd burn one and take the other one with as I wandered the night. I people watched in bars, started up conversations with perfect strangers, flirted with women I had no intention of ever dating, and I loved it. I was single. I was free. No longer was I going to spend my nights chewing my legs off in hopes of escaping the various black widows whose webs I happened to stumble upon. I was over it. I was through. Even the good ones were bad.

But my few walks of shame were never as thrilling as Spot and Thrill had made them sound on tape. I had been clowned for being a serial monogamist. I was made fun of because I wanted more than just a fuck. But what I eventually learned was that my Friday, regardless of what I ended up doing, were almost always more fulfilling than those of my naysaying homeboys.

On this Friday I am in the mountains surrounding Lake Arrowhead, two hours outside of LA. I am here for more work than play. There's an act of a script to finish before I head out of town to see Ralph and Sonya stroll down the aisle up in Jersey. But there was also a conversation I needed to have, about myself, past, present and future. Here, far away from all the troubles and worries that seem to have plagued me ever since I departed from the place where I became a man.

Somewhere between the words, God tried for the 11th time to make it clear that all that I've endured was no punishment, that I was not the things I owned, or a signature on a title page, or any of the other singular faces of which the world occasionally took interest. No one said it better than Tyler Durden. I'm not my fuckin' khakis.

If I could go back I'd learn the lesson a hell of a lot faster. But I can't. Just as I can't stop what's coming. Nor can I leave the game, because (I know from experience) that it will find me whereever I try to hide. The best thing I can do is breathe in and out, straining idiocy from the air within these borders in hopes that I don't die as dumb as the folks who believe everything Oprah tells them, then exhale my number 9 dream until it fells all the foes that surround me, flushing the hate in their eyes back into their own veins to kill them where they stand. End of line.

Use As Directed

2009-10-01T21:32:00.000-07:00

So I'm riding shotgun in my godsister's drop-top '93 5.0. While this might be the perfect time for me to channel Cain in 'Menace', the ten year-old girl in the backseat makes for a slightly different portrait. We are driving her to swim practice. And we are late. But as her big eyes, eyes donated with love by her Mama, stare up at the blue, clear and polluted Hell-LA skies, time doesn't seem to matter.

I can't tell whether I'm here or there. I could be me in my seat, but I remember being in hers so clearly that the distance in between seems less than an instant.

She talks to us fluidly, remarking on everything from the way my godsister drives to passing cars and parking rules. She is the classic only child, always in search of someone to share with, as her plate is always bigger than what her own belly can handle.

She asks me to sit poolside while she's in class. As I watch her I remember my days of forward crawls and kick boards. I remember the taste of chlorine in my mouth from coughing up water I didn't mean to swallow. She will be tall like her father. I come to realize that I will most likely know her as a grown woman. By then I will be a middle aged man. That scares me.

Fast forward an evening and I'm falling in love with Rosie Perez all over again, the first Puerto Rican girl I'd ever heard of. Though she and Spike are captured onscreen as if it's '89 all over again, and I'm still 13 (She was 25) 20 years have and gone faster than Joe Turner on lash detail.

Now she's 45. I'm 33. The mileage has changed us. I'll never stare at clear skies the way I used to, even if their value only appreciates. I'll never share my world the way I did with perfect strangers and my parents grownup friends just to hear voices other than my own.

But surprisingly all of this is good news, as I'm thrilled to know that the best of me has not changed. Even when I tried my hardest to erase the parts of me that throbbed with pain...from growth, the dreams I set ablaze brought the cauldron from which new things are born to a boil. The right hands reach us from far beyond our sight line. Every acorn falls to the earth at the chosen moment.

We can never keep up with the Creator's to do list. If we have any good sense we'll simply find safety swimming in the pot of gold at the other end of doing as were told. No more wrestling with the angels. No more exhibition bouts with the man upstairs. I'm too beaten. I'm too bloody. The clock only picks up speed as it tick tocks to the end of line.

Signs (End of A Line)

2009-09-25T11:41:00.000-07:00

I'm driving down Hauser at mid-afternoon when this kid casually steps out in front of me. He looks me dead in the eyes the whole time, as if to dare me not to brake. I slow to a stop and his little homeboys on the other side of the street give him props, as if death by automobile collision due to stupidity is a worthy way to go out, at ten years old.

His defiance angers me. Then I quickly remember all the dumb shit we used to do back in the old neighborhood. There were so many times that I should have been saying my prayers against a casket. But like water against a mountain, the danger flowed around me. I was unable to stray from the path I had chosen, even if a part of me didn't want it anymore. I had no idea what life was. And I'm only beginning to here and now.

I stand in a foreign space decorated with the touch of blind man with a tone deaf sense of feng shui. But the rooms are big and wide. The windows let in the perfect amount of sunlight. There's a nook for me to work right next to the kitchen. There's a room perfect for prayer and yoga. I am home even before I am home. The war fought to get here will be more than worth it.

I sit across a lunch table from a director from Jersey. He's got one of those extreme LA haircuts and looks like he might have played drums in a hair band during the frist greed decade. But when we talk we have more than I ever thought in common. We both love women. We both love food. We both love film. He has a project in mind. This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I sit across from a brother with a British and Jamaican accent, slurping coffee to stay awake after a night of barely sleeping. As we discuss a storyline our thoughts keep landing on the same page. I don't even know why he added me on Facebook. But here and now it's all as clear as Evian in crystal. The way it went was the only way to go. Things have been moving. I just didn't stay still long enough to feel my world turning.

Alice Russell sings on someone else's stereo. Most of my movies and music have been stolen by desperate hands. But like that apartment full of things that kept me in Brooklyn when I needed to leave, what is needed will return right on time. Everything else was excess baggage on a plane that needed to get off the runway post-haste, for the sake of many more souls than just my own.

I dream of fresh fruit, potatoes and mimosas in bed, the smell of caffeinated hazelnut mixing with sandalwood, jasmine and the smell of a her on my sheets. I'm longing for a midnight arrival when it's still only eleven. Patience is a virtue that is still just beyond my grasp.

The dark clouds of a year-long apocalypse are in retreat. The armies against me have been pushed back beyond the bulge. Bullets still fly all around me. But I step between them like the falling rain that's upgrading a previous version of self, a boy whose time for play is now over. I'm climbing a mountain with chipped teeth and torn nails. But I will not fall. I never fall. End of line.

All My Life

2009-09-21T11:34:00.000-07:00

You spend weeks writing a script and then weeks waiting to hear the verdict. In the meantime you're looking for your next job, which depending on what you need at the time, might be one of many that you take on at once to remain in the style you're accustomed to. You think to yourself that maybe this set of irons in the fire will be the ones you hammer into your own personal episodes of a Robin Leach rerun. Times aren't always bad. The good moments can get you through the hardest years.

I am thinking about home in a different way as I come to the end of a gauntlet I was pretty certain that I could not survive. And yet, as usual, here I am, surviving and doing things that most people I know wouldn't and couldn't. That doesn't make me any better or worse. It just makes me...me.

It took both giving up and losing most of the things that seemed to matter at the start of all of this, and facing so many of the nightmares in the back of my mind. My karma is good enough that I have never missed a meal or gone without a place to rest my head. You can only appreciate that so much until you don't have it anymore.

You forget what it's like to have your own bed, much less sleep late in it. You forget the idea of waking up when you want to. You sacrifice the meals and outings you want for what's practical. You take love where you find it, in its many different forms, but that false sense of safety you used to find addictive is now replaced by a general distrust that all the things that feel right are a trap set specifically to take you back down into another hell. You are a boat without oars tossing and turning between the waves in hopes that you just might wash up on a friendlier shore.

I am Ulysses trying to come home and an Ithaca is finally in sight, the sum of who I was before scattered across the ocean like the ashes from the urn where my remains were once kept. The urge to ask why is smothered by an understanding that all roads led here, where ever this is. The last thing I remember I was cruising through Prospect Park, feeling the flying insects smash against me as I picked up speed. I tried to hit the brakes and took flight, landing underneath the palm trees of a paradise lost, armed with nothing but loose names and phrases to chase down my quarry, targets I chose before I ever landed in my mother's womb.

What sounds like static to everyone else is a message loud and clear in my ears. What makes sense to the masses is often overridden by the instructions of folks on the other side of the mirror. As an Ithaca comes into view I already know that it is not the place where my wife and kids are waiting. That arrival is lifetimes away. Instead I'll settle for 8 to 12 walls and enough jobs to give me the right to get out of here, my home for now, in one piece. End of line.

Whining and Rhyming

2009-09-14T11:39:00.000-07:00

For anyone worried that I might have vanished, know that my blogging has a tendency to go on ice whenever I have a serious deadline. And when there are two weeks to complete a clean 100-page draft of the script, the rest of the world literally disappears.

I took the weekend off, but somewhere between the season finale of True Blood and the end of Mad Men, Facebook came alive with chatters about another stage crashing at an awards show. While it was entertaining when ODB did it, I don't think I've heard anyone in hip hop whine as much as Kanye West. I want to say that this wasn't always the case with 'Ye, that he caught the Vapors and started believing his own hype. But the truth is the truest true-ism of entertainment. Fame only brings to the forefront what was already there.

The first time I ever heard about Kanye was during an MTV featured about The College Dropout, which at the time didn't have a name or a release date. I had been a fan of what he'd done behind the boards and was looking forward to the twice in a decade phenomenon of a true backpacked coming out on the Roc as a mainstream artist. But there never seemed to be a release date.

A few weeks later I ran in John Monopoly, Kanye's manager at the time and a boy of mine from college. He told me that he was managing Kanye and that there was a press gathering for him at the then newly-opened 40/40 Club. Kanye and I didn't speak when I was there but I paid attention to his body language as he implored us, the media, to help get his budgets opened at Roc-A-Fella and his album to the streets. I was already halfway out of the game by then by as I listen to this young 20-something kid to seems to be on the verge of either tears or tantrum because he couldn't get his album out, even after the horrible car accident and a string of bangers from Jay-Z on down. I wanted to do what I could to help. I wanted to see this man win. And he won. And all should have been good. But it wasn't.

By album two Kanye was the Louie'd down asshole swearing to God that he'd been robbed at awards shows, despite the fact that his meteoric rise had made him bigger, or at least on par, with the very names who had brought him to the forefront in the first place. For myself, personally, I would have been happy just to be sitting in VIP at the party, but this kid is like the hero of that old fairy tales who keeps asking for more and more from the magical creature he rescue until he ends up back in the hovel where he began. Icarus flew so close to the sun that his wings melted and he plunged into the sea.

Now hey Kanye, if you're reading this (which I doubt more than my changes of getting Keri Hilson and Jill Jones into a threesome with me) I'm more than sympathetic to the closet grieving you've had to do as an only child who lost his mother in the middle of his climb towards the stratosphere. I respected the whole George Bush comment while Mike Myers looked on like he wished someone could have hooked you with a cane. I'm happy that you've got yourself a fly lady whose main profession seems to be looking good on your arm. But when you're grabbing the mic from bubble gum pop stars, you've gone too far.

While ego is a part of the business, so is learning humility. Perhaps Kanye can't remember all of those years when hip hop fans detested most award shows because they wouldn't even offer categories for us. Will Smith, one of the only rappers richer than you, played the game long enough to get himself awards at every show. Jigga even picked up one or two while he was boycotting the Grammy for the previously named reason. Some of hip hop's favorite artists have been robbed year after year. But I think that's because the fame isn't what they do it for.

As I've listened to Kanye's lyrics since day one, he, like Pharell, has seemd subconsciously fixated on getting back at the girls who didn't give him the time of day in high school and offering dissertations on how great his life has been since.
Whereas his mentor, Jay-Z, has always used material items as a means to illustrate what he's built an empire that affords him life's pleasure, Kanye has always seemed more to me like a Real Housewives of Atlanta, someone needed to prove his worth to the world by leaning on the fashion labels and other corporate outfits that milk him for his viability, for as long as it's going to last.

While he still makes dope music, I think I checked out on Kanye the rapper right after "Flashing Lights" It's been easy to do as his whining has increased exponentially since then. People are starving. People are systematically oppressed and suppressed. There's terminally ill dude that's sweeter than you that doesn't have the time left to blow you off the face of the planet. Some stupid kid has hurt someone to get the shoes or the chain or whatever else to make them feel like they're a little closer to you. Remember that those who whine often end up in the corner. And some of them never get out. End of line.

Have all the tantrums and all the noise been so that Daddy would see what you grew up to be without him? Are you still living in high school when you were probably an invisible as I due to your gifts and worldview? Whatever's bugging you is something need to get over and get back into the studio. If you've always been doing the job because you love it, then what are you complaining for? End of line.

Black Girl Lost

2009-09-03T13:45:00.001-07:00

This starts in a different place and time, a dark room with brick walls in Atlanta's West End. I am 19 years old and playing the wall in a room filled with music and moving bodies, many of whom I know and others whose faces are at the very least familiar. This is my custom. This is what I do.

She is on the other side of the dancers, a former TV star taking the time to get her education. She a rich chocolate and beautiful, narrow magnetic eyes and her sculpted curves that are mathematically perfect. Every straight boy at my school full of them had dreams of taking their shot. But that night the time was mine.

I cross the floor more effortlessly than I ever have since, fueled by the fact that she is a friend of a friend. Later, she would agree to play a character in a table read of a script penned by myself and her boy, my very first writing partner, a man makes as much noise in his world as I now do in mine.

I can feel the glares of all those around me who want me to fail. I feel the hate dripping from their chins as the temperature of the room slowly begins to rise. I look her straight in the eye and subversively command her to get on the floor with me. She obliges without argument. We move in sync for ten minutes of my life. By the following school year she is as gone as an exit in the rear view.

The next time I see her is in movies, particularly a C-grade relationship story that my close buddies and I treat as a comedy, even though it's not supposed to be. I remember thinking that she was to be the next thing. But "next" and "thing" do not always equal happy endings. She becomes close with a good friend of mine. She becomes a wife and has her husbands child before the union dissolves into chaos.
She does a music video that gets her some buzz, but long is the way up out of hell.

When she sees me in a store she runs up to me as if we're ex-lovers or at the least the best of friends. Her chill stoic vibe has been replaced by motormouth cokehead kinds of rants. I have trouble following her trains of thought. Her hands touch my arms and chest in inappropriate ways. It becomes obvious to me that she's looking for a new "sponsor".

I tell her I have a meeting and she offers to drive me. One corner of her Benz SUV is smashed. She drops me off in front of the studio and says to call when I'm done. She wants to hang out. I have a girlfriend back in New York. I'm faithful. I don't make the call. Still, she calls me, sounding drained and depressed, obviously down from whatever had her so up. She begs me to come see her. I tell her I'll call back but don't. My homeboys call me a fool. Someone suggests I invite her over so that we can feed on her addiction. I'm not that kind of man.

Years go by and she washes up on Youtube singing for crack. It gets more hits than a lot of better clips. It's sad and grim and I think about her mother, who I met once or twice, a famous author who owned the place where my partner lived. She loses her daughter. Her Mom dies. Everything I hear just keeps getting worse. Then I scan the Twitter home page and see her name. Youtube shows me someone else.

But she's not the woman I remember, though she looks surprisingly the same for what have probably been years on one drug or the next. She rants to herself and the camera man while she munches on chips in the shotgun seat, waiting for her pimp to return.
People I grew up with have suffered far worse fates but for some reason this is different. This seems like a real tragedy.

For some there are no comebacks. Some are meant to be fed to the beasts they called forth in desperate times, their stories a skull and bones for those on their way down the same path. I didn't want to post this video but I also need you to know that this is all real. I don't even know what she's saying. I don't know what she's doing. But the truth is that I never really knew her. She was a face in the halls of HBCU heaven familiar enough for a greeting, a frame between my arms at parties and gatherings for less than a moment of eternity.

As underneath it all I am the biggest optimist there is, I hope there's a Whitney turnaround in her future, or at least a slamming on the brakes. I never want anyone to have to walk through darkness. But sometimes that's the only way to get to the light. End of line.

Note: After writing this blog I learned definitely about Maia's schizophrenia, which her mother, Bebe Moore Campbell documented in her book, 72-Hour Hold. I wish her the best and ask you to all keep her in your prayers.

Things We Lost in The Fire

2009-09-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

If there are two halves that make my whole, then it was the other one who lit the fuse. He did it late at night, while the rest of me was sleeping, pulled near comatose by the power of clouds painted red, black and green. The reasons why were as vast as the four elements, his intellect citing the means that some farmers use to feed the soil on their land, setting back the clock by turning it to ash, and eating all trace evidence of crimes both committed and endured along the way. Had the rest of me been awaken we would have only watched, meditating on the words of one James McNulty in the final moments of his journey as a cop. "If you felt it needed doin..."

I spent the winter within splintered and smoke-stained walls. All the things I loved on the outside withered and died. Birds flew south, east and west in search of new sources of warmth, as the waters around me began to freeze. As I waited, living off scraps I caught in traps and a pocket full of passive IOUs from the life before last, I dreamt of my house in all of its glory, and a bed within where I never felt alone. But when I strolled through all of the old rooms, rechecking my steps, it seemed as if no one else had ever really been there except for stray cats who knew better than to leave prints on a white rug, as they might easily lead to their capture and conviction.

The bricks in my new foundation are heavy. I feel the strain on my brain, back and arms. The Egyptians taught me how to build without mortar. All I had to do was join the pieces that fit. Someday these bricks in a square will be a mansion on the side of a mountain, overlooking the rising sun. I will stand before it in a tree pose and inhale the ocean air that caresses my face, like the hands of the ghosts in my bed that were there and not there, the same way I am to the world, here and now.

I visit the old home every once in awhile, mostly to take samples from the footprints on the walls, tiny specks of nail polish in my favorite colors, the pungent scents of love and lust left behind for a studio audience of one. Sometimes I miss the things we lost in the fire. But I don't need them anymore. They would only be more things to carry as Elegba's semi-trucks arrive, filled with things for this new chosen place and time, a home made of brick that cannot burn, a house the big bad wolves can never blow down. End of line.

Heartbreak Hotel

2009-08-26T22:34:00.000-07:00

I have been living this moment over and over since boyhood. A DJ spins the soundtrack while I study the way she moves. She is tall with thick thighs, short with a curly fro and breasts the size of volleyballs. She is 43 or 25, her hair cut short and permed or with locks running down to her ankles.

I am there but not there, too shy to ever speak the never-ending strings of words being composed in my brain. I am imagining conversations from two sides of a table, watching flicks under the influence, Scrabble games and lazy Sundays. She does not see me. The macho man deep inside my chest instructs me to cross the dance floor and give it my best. I have to win. I cannot lose.

If I can't put her digits in the book (or phone for you young bucks that can't remember life before we chained ourselves to the world). But usually long before I rise to make that move the context clues make it clear that it's not the cards.

In this particular case she is with some guy I think might be bi in a summer suit the color of seersucker with a bowtie to match. I know she is his because her bustier is the same color as his costume. Her behind is perfectly pronounced in pants made of cotton that have no choice but to stretch. Her mocha skin is flawless. But there's an emptiness in her facial expression. Either she doesn't want to be here, or she was never here to begin with.

She wants to be somewhere else, away from this place that makes a gimmick out of shooting jets of C02 onto the partygoers at irregular intervals. I'm too old for this shit. I would ask myself what I'm doing here but I came to meet someone who I'm sure is on her way to mastering her art. Plus she's in love with the DJ, whom I know from another life, and whom I think has a better chance of finding happiness at this point in time than at the one where he said "I do".

I stare at the target until she disappears into the crowd with seersucker man. A white boy with long curly hair dances awkwardly with every woman that will let him, including the obvious sex industry workers and that unnatural blonde with what seemed be some kind of a hair weave. I don't regret my decision, as she reminds me too much of broken hearts I had to replace and the general cynicism that shields the damage from public view.

Here and now I am bulletproof. I am impervious to harm. I dare them to all come at me at once with their weapons that can no longer phase me. I never met a woman in a club and had it go anywhere. The same thing goes for most of homeboys. These places are for a different world, one where it's all about getting away from everything outside of cubicles and meetings, budget cuts and rats scavenging after cheese at a time when the cows are dry and sickly. This has never been where I belong.

I know people who can do this every night. But I am not one of them. I don't think my words can ever capture that woman's beauty. This account is a moment in a time from the P.O.V. of an invisible stranger that she will not remember, because she never saw me. I am not the dude that buys out the bar. I'm not the guy that dances all night.

I am he who steps between the raindrops in hopes of not getting soaked by other people's problems. But that too is what I do. And as I offer advice to my new wide-eyed friend, I understand that I've been brought here to do just that. The target of my gaze and the many others like her here, dressed to garner the attention of Average Joes looking for love on the inside of their thongs, doesn't speak my language.

My queen, just like me, knows this world but is not of it. She weaves through songs and blends, hugs and handshakes, flowing toward the desired goal at the chosen place and time. She knows the lyrics by heart because she pushes play to keep herself sane. The girl in the white pants might have a better ass, but in the world where I live, love cannot live by ass alone.

I make my exit late circa last call, find the car and drive home through the dead streets of a city that only slightly resembles the one we built as kids. I can't return to the innocence I lost in that parking lot in Langley Park. I cannot erase the rush that used to come with her writing her name and number in pen on a napkin one party out of every ten, even if those digits went nowhere.

But I'm not that kid anymore. He was a curious cat who got killed nine times and buried in the backyard of my memory. In his place stands a someone else who even I have trouble defining, a he who sees and knows far more than he can can express on a train zooming past all local stops, racing toward the end of a thin red line.

Dea Ex Machina

2009-08-25T17:22:00.001-07:00

When faced with a dilemma or coming to a crossroads, we as Black folks are taught to ask ourselves what Jesus would do. Whenever that said statement was proposed for my given situation, I always had far more interest in the paternal part of the Holy Trinity. As written in the Bible, God is the ultimate CEO, overseeing every product, action and effect that has to do with the running of the machine that is our world. And he runs thousands of these, seemingly without ever breaking a sweat.

I was warned once, on the very edge of adulthood, that I could never work his job, that there wasn't enough room in my little brain to comprehend all that he had to carry. I understood this, and even embraced it, but it seemed as time after time, when I was in tough spots and impossible situations the answers just came to me. And for awhile I was foolish enough to think that whatever magical thing happened to pop into my own little head was completely of my devising. I was a believer in free will and the power of choice. I could be whomever I wanted to me. I could do whatever I wanted to do because I was a free man living in a free world. But at least half of that was an illusion.

Somewhere, in darkness, I found myself in a situation where I was standing at a crossroads. One path led to a gun in my face. The other led me toward a kind of bliss that I'd been seeking for as long as I could remember. The problem was that neither road was marked. I had to read invisible signs and trust in my intuition to see which was my feet might travel. I knew what I was going to do before I did it.
But when the doing came around it wasn't my own finger on the trigger, but that of the He/She upstairs and his cabinet.

As I watched the game of chess play out along the surface of my day I saw every move I'd executed over days and weeks unmade and my favorite dream burned to a crisp in the name of a kind of safety that I may never for myself, one that is a constant in another world, the one where I've been playing house and trying to convince myself that the game would go on forever, because it was a thing I so badly craved.

One flash forward and I was standing on the sound stage that I'd started to see as a way of life, a bridge to Neverland designed to turn to dust the minute I tried to cross it. Unlike Eddie Murphy's Chandler Gerald, there was only one way to walk on the path, and it wasn't to the part of town where Mr. Rourke and Tattoo laid their heads.

I do not feel that I had a choice in this. It felt like hands came from beyond and rearranged the furniture while I was asleep so that I would never lost track of the road outside, the one I am both gifted and cursed to continue walk, moving towards a something so large that it stretches beyond the frame of my vision, a monument to something far beyond my comprehension. It's not for me to know and not for me to see, at least not yet. End of line.

The Grind (Day One)

2009-08-24T08:27:00.000-07:00

Eyes open. 8:30am. The madre's gone. Eight pages left. I need to hand in my first act by 9am West Coast time.

I pour a glass of apple juice, wash last night's dishes and put a flame to the long stick of White Diamonds incense I bought from the corner store down the street. The smell of weed was in the air early on the streets, hovering just above my head like the deadline long past.

I picture the scenes in my mind and write them out in script format. It's cumbersome when compared with prose. I worry about writing too much instead of too little. I clear two pages in an hour and the other six in the 90 minutes that follow. Almost there.

Here come the text messages. These daily lifelines come from folks all over the world. For Wood and I it's the exchange of quotes from movies we ran into the ground back at the old opium den. MTM needs to vent. The Dervish needs to laugh. My sister need room to breathe. But I've gotta get this done.

I make chicken sausage and home fries, wishing I had shrimp, peppers and yellow polentas. The smell of garlic fuels the freeze frames that make the script whole. I eat and review. I review and then eat.

An hour before time I find solace in proofing and attaching the file. The pointed cursor hovers over the 'send' button for a beat. I pray that they love it, even though no one in this biz completely loves anything. Message sent.

I take a break to watch Top Chef and Psych. It sucks to get eliminated on the first episode. It also sucks that Sean and Gus seem a little...displaced...this season.

I eat PBJs to avoid dirtying the kitchen. A cop car idles in the driveway across the street in search of speeders. Blog's done. It's pushing five. Time to be out. End of line.

Surviving The Game

2009-08-18T23:01:00.000-07:00

All is quiet on the western front. Or at least the wheels and gears I need to turn are beneath layers and layers of nothing happening. Here I am once again watching women, women both with and without children, who get up each and every day with the feeling that there are either completely, relatively, or accursedly by themselves in their daily dose of the war that is life.

A few days ago I was telling my godsisters about the recent wedding I attended and they asked if I caught the bride’s garter. When I explained that that particular custom wasn’t a part of the ceremony, there was a comment about how there were rarely enough men at African American weddings to gather for the spectacle of the whole garter toss.

My first impulse was to argue that that wasn’t true. But as I’ve come to make a habit of showing up at most nuptials stag, I’ve noticed the deep truth my dear friend Stephie’s words implicated. And though I’ve grown bored with rehashing the state of Black America beyond the Soledad O’Brien specials, I keep going back to the words I shared with my new homeboy Nyaze at one of he and his wife’s True Blood Parties in Venice.

He’s from VA. I’m from DC. We both knew and knew too many of our peers that went out in the streets of a 90s world far behind us. And even if they didn’t die we watch them fade away, their potential painted over with drug and sex habits, bulging bellies glazed over ambitions, prison rides, illegitimate kids plural, living at home permanently, etc. When we looked back we couldn’t seem to figure out how it was that boys who were stronger, more charismatic, more talented and together than ourselves, seemed to step into the snares we somehow made it around. It causes us to suffer from a kind of survivor’s guilt, one that finds us looking back each and every time someone poses the inevitable question of where the boys are.

I know that this isn’t new. My father has lived with it for most of his life, and I’m sure that his father did as well. My mother’s father sat with me on a porch just a few years before he would pass on and explained to me that I didn’t want to get old, because for him it meant living long enough to see all his friends go.

But before you think this is a grim blog, what it makes me think about is the exhilaration each of my parent’s feels at the idea of new life, of nurturing souls so that they might grow into beings that make different choices, mice that make it out of the maze to become men. Though those of us who have survived are plenty enough, we know that our children will most likely grow up in a community that is a confederacy of sorts, a land made of various states string together by skin color and census ID.

Someday, years from now, the yoke we bear here and now will hopefully make way for weddings in our middle years where both garter and bouquet are tossed into thick crowds of hopefuls that look like us. It may be a ways off but I know it’s there. I’ve seen it. I know it. And I can’t wait for the time when it arrives. End of line.

See You Laters

2009-08-17T12:12:00.000-07:00

One of the things my faith has taught me is to be careful what you ask for, to properly form the words in your mind before you say the prayer. You should think about not only what you want, but the implications that that desire might have on your overall karma, your loved ones, your community and even the planet as a whole. The beauty of youth and young adulthood is being able to pilot the spaceship whichever you want, throwing levers and dials each and every way just because you like how they look, or the sounds that they make. You either forget or don't understand that there is a design to it all, even if the blueprints are far too large for you to every see past your own road.

In eight days I became many men. I felt like Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon when the long-legged 21 year-old Dominican model slid me her card across the group dinner table and said "Promise me that once in your life you'll call and talk to me."

It was then that I understood Danny's Roger Murtaugh far too well when he said "I'm too old for this shit."

I am lounging in a smoke-filled room with the Dervish talking about the pitter-pattering that comes with the best forms of being in L-O-V-E, a feeling neither of us have known for the duration of our friends, though we are surrounded by couples and folks taking that next step. Yet, though in different ways, we both have more pressing obstacles to tackle.

I'm riding a borrowed bike up Nostrand Avenue and thanking the Creator for all the different shades of brown extending from the shorts, sleeves, straps and plunging neckslines of some of the most beautiful women in the world. They generally don't seem grow this way out West. And the ones that do are beyond my sight lines.

I'm grilling Swai (which I found for the very first time on the East Coast at the Fairway in Red Hook) with curry, white wine and cheddar for fish tacos. It made me proud when the plates for every course went clean.

But as I sit on the bus, headed to my next destination, I'm glad that I'm leaving. Brooklyn is that favorite lover who always knows how to get me back in bed to forget about all the others. I need the space to complete the mission. The voices calling me back to Hell-A are limited in number, but they are loud. I will put my possessions on a train and go after them, chasing down present, future and the first set of tangible feelings I've known for a long time. One by one, my reasons for staying in the here and now have evaporated. But I know I'll be back. And those that matter will be waiting for me when I return.
End of line.

Eye Know

2009-08-14T07:20:00.000-07:00

It is nighttime. Food from Havana by way of 46th Street is fuel for the night ahead, an excursion through moving bodies and flashing lights culminating in De La Soul taking the stage. I missed them the last two times they were in LA. It's been 9 years since the last time I saw them on the stage. I own all of their albums. I know all the songs.
Being there, despite my aching feet, is its own kind of a church, a pot of gold at the end of a certain kind of rainbow.

But this moment, no matter how watershed, is just one of many scenes held up to the lamp for recollection, another frame in this flick about how I spent my summer vacation, a brief getaway from the constant game of chance that is Hell-A. But here, in this moment, as I am close enough to smell the conditioner in the mane of curly hair in front of me, an ice cream dream melting away beneath the rays of chance and probability, I keep having to remind myself that I don't live here anymore. Like some twisted dream sequence in a flick, part of me wants my old job back, my old life, the fertile from whence all that was flourished. But there is no reverse, only moving forward. And besides, those towers have since turned to salt.

My friends back at homebase miss me. My Twilight is on her last legs and I need to nurse her back to health. I'm on a deadline with another to come soon and three projects to finish on my own time. Still, I find myself waiting, staring at a certain door just knowing that it will swing open as soon as I arrive before it. If not I'll have to wait. Maybe that's the lesson of all of this, that things only come when they're meant to. There is a season for everything.

The winter of my discontent is slowly becoming a spring in my step. Maybe it's the air out here, or the way sistas' fill their dresses and jeans this time of year. Or maybe I'm finally learning the lesson. Maybe, after all of this time, I'm finally starting to get it.

The Ring

2009-08-11T09:07:00.000-07:00

I am trapped in a Prince lyric: "Picture if you will a courtyard/an ocean of violets and blues/as the most strike curious poses/they feel the heat/the heat between me and you" [Readers, if I got it wrong, accept the fact that I am not Prince-perfect]. The lyrics run through my mind as I bear witness to a wedding. LaToya and Eric have become LaTeric, a hybrid of souls intertwined on a mission to where no love has gone before. [Note to self: Never make note of two different pop culture references in the same paragraph]

It's day four of my visit with eastern promise. People are hitched. People are camping. My godbrother has a crown. My brain is used to the walking and biking, but my feet hurt. LA's made me soft.

It's a good thing that I didn't come here looking for an illusion to buy into. I knew that a home is always home. The things you miss are quickly replaced by the peeves that never got out from under your skin. But when you embrace the friends you used to see almost daily, take in the pungent aroma of curried beef at Typhoon in L.E.S., see the fibers of relationships twisting and change like the smoke curling from a cigarette, it all of a sudden becomes clear that, much like you thought, leaving was the best thing for you. None of what is to come could be without my bearing the yoke now. I know that and my people know that. So it all works out in the end.

I saw a ghost through a restaurant window. But it didn't see me. I was thankful for that. The parties die down and the schedule becomes a matter pages instead of moments. Rent is due. It's time to make the donuts. End of line.

Resurrection Boulevard

2009-08-07T06:40:00.000-07:00

I've always loved the way the sun hits the buildings from deck at Casa de Seda. It's one of those portraits God put his name on, and a morning view that reminds me of all the things I missed at points west. It's the reverse of the ending of one of the novels of my youth, Bright Lights, Big City, where a heartbroken and coked out writer who can't write finds renewal while eating a roll of fresh bread as the sun rises above Manhattan. He was out of control. This morning, despite the fact that I've only slept a few hours,that makes me feel more in harmony with my environment than I have in the last few years. I had to miss her to remember why I love her so much.

All it took was a welcoming hug at the Dervish's door, and an hour on the stoop at dusk with Brandi and Karen, to reinforce the fact that this place is still home. And it will be again, as soon as the folks upstairs say that I'm up for parole. In minutes I will borrow a bike and begin to zip through the old nooks and crannies where I lodged the pieces of both heart and life I buried for periodic returns like these. I needed to know that it was still the same. And it is.

Sure prices are going up. Sure everyone's broke. But the madness of being cluttered together with so many seems to suit me far more than the ten different freeways and the smells of excess and anti-depressants that is Hell-A. I am back to recharge and retool. My baby Toya is getting married. My godbrother is getting crowned. The Dervish wants us to jam six months of lounging nights into my short stay. And in between it all I have a screenplay to finish and projects plural to dive into.
I never needed to getaway (or at least not a long-term one) when I was here. In LA the need for renewal comes once every six weeks.

Today, there are small things to do like getting my suit pressed and copping a new dress shirt and a fresh pair of Adidas. I want to see the Cloisters uptown. There is the need for sushi at my favorite spot and for me to cook a few meals to wolf down with some of my closest peoples. This electricity crackles all around me as Brooklyn gently eases me back into her canal so that I can be born anew on the Ressurection Boulevard that is Fulton Street. And I'm loving every minute of it. End of line.

The Long Walk

2009-08-06T08:46:00.001-07:00

It was almost two years ago that I had a dream that I was a part of a heist gone wrong. My partners in crime and I pulled over at an abandoned house on a desert road and I got out of the car. The rest of them pulled off. A beat later the cops were chasing them into infinity. The bright yellow sun was high in the sky, which was a perfect blue. So I started walking in the other direction, down the long deserted road toward the next town.

On the other side of marvelous times spent under the influence of rum and weed and the seductive illusion that can be l-o-v-e, I often wonder if said dream was a literal message sent from the folks upstairs. I was told to prepare myself for a journey. Two years later I'm living on the other side of the world and starting up a whole new thing.

But on this particular evening the walk is literal. My feet are on plant on the soil of my birth home for less than 18 hours. My mother is breathing country air. No one else, except for MTM, even knows that I'm in town. [Forgive me Pop but I'll see ya in about a week ;)] There's nothing on TV and my mind is too scattered for work. So I walk.

A meeting has just let out at the Latino AA chapter on 14th Street. Middle-aged men stand out front chatting and smoking squares as they clutch styrofoam cups filled with hot coffee, even when it's above eighty outside. Three different brothers in their twenties pass me wearing uniforms from various retail outfits and backpacks filled with God knows what. A chocolate woman in a black dress with a spiky fro reminds me of one of my favorite seductive illusions, now long gone.

A gay white man gives me a double take as I pass the Tivoli, as if I shouldn't be there. Had it been ten years before the local homeboys would have probably stripped him down to his drawers while they chased him back down to Dupont Circle in a tinted-out hooptie.

Two drunks of Central American origin pass a bottle of cheap vodka back and forth as they argue in Spanish about either their boss or their landlord. The accents are too thick to make out.

I am shark in the way that I have to stay in motion. Staying still kills me slowly. As one foot moves in front of the other I think about all of the times that I forgot this about myself, resulting in a number of episodes where I tried my damnedest to build houses in places where I was only meant to pitch tents. Wisdom is accepting the truth that one can know everything and nothing at all.

It's human to get tired after a long walk, especially when the next town seems so far off in the distance. But the gift and the curse is that I know I'll make it, whether it's the Mojave or crosstown traffic in Manhattan on a weeknight. Dark clouds have gathered overhead. The coming storm will be my baptism in the name of my father's father and his son. I am alone but not alone. I am here but no here. And I am dealing with it. End of line.

While You Were Sleeping

2009-08-04T07:29:00.000-07:00

My Ipod likes to tell stories. While it’s somewhat silly for the naysayers out there to think that an electronic device might have a mind of it’s own, I swear that it’s choosing every song I’ve thought of in the last 12 hours, from Tribe’s “Bonita Applebum” and Weezer’s “Beverly Hills” to BDP’s “The Bridge is Over” and Res’ “Tsunani”. It’s almost as if it knows something, as if I’m being reminded of where I came from in order to get where I’m heading. The City of Angels is as dead as the hip-hop I knew. But while they’re sleeping I’m making my way East, in search of all that I’ve left behind.

Maybe it was the lone cigarette sucking shuttle driver who barely spoke to me during the hour-long ride to Orange County where my Cheap Tickets flight will dock or the taste of my very first buttermilk donut on the ride to LAX, but the thing I'm missing the most about a daywalking city is being nocturnal. It's too quiet out here, too docile. But then again it is a Tuesday.

There have been storms and rumors of storms to come. I need to hear the sound of thunder rolling, to feel the electric crackling of lightning in the dark skies above. I need to know that summer everywhere is not the same day every day. It’s also a celebration. I’ve made it for six months in Hell-LA.

Somewhere on the long eastern coast, a friend and her man will be bound together in holy matrimony. A young man set off on his voyage toward enlightenment painted in white and red. I will be reunited with the few souls unafraid to tell me that they miss me. And I will enter my own karmic cave to do battle with the ghosts of summers past. I know how this story ends, but I don’t know how I get there. I also don’t know how I’m going to make my deadline for the powers that be. But that’s normal. I never do ;)

In this moment I'm reminded of an early morning long ago, a day when I set out on one of my annual trips west. The early light of a gray day contrasted against the warmth of her naked body in my bedroom. She held me close as the cab was on the way, fearing (as usual) that I might never return again. The elongated kiss was meant to remind that I should come home when the day was through. But that day is still ticking by, and that relationship was as doomed as Speed Racer at the box office.

It occurred to my godsister and I that in our adult lives we’ve never traveled by air with anyone else. I was 20 the last time I sat next to someone on a plane that I knew, though it’s the norm for the masses. They find safety in numbers. Crowds are the last place I’ll ever feel safe.

I am excited. I am afraid. I may drop to my knees and kiss the streets of my former promised land when comparing it to the purgatory where I now live and breathe. But I have my reasons for doing laps in hellfire. I’m putting a team together. It’s only a matter of time before we’re fully ready and able...to play the game...and win.
End of line.

XX/XY

2009-07-31T16:18:00.000-07:00

So I'm having breakfast in real life and time with an FB homie who I have a million folks in common with. Married with children, LA has been home for a good chunk of her life. Thus the things I find strange have been her norm. This is a good thing and a good meeting as we sit against the backdrop of the Aroma Cafe, an indoor/outdoor place in the valley that serves as home to mid-level stars and everyone else trying to chip off their own nugget from Tinseltown's dwindling gold mines.

"I don't know much about you," she said with a smile. "But I know you love women." I feel myself blushing at the statement, not because it's true or untrue, but more that I get a little squirmy when people through my own words right back at me. She makes a note of the fact that so many more women comment on my FB statuses than men. I argue that given the demographics in the communities of people of color, the number of computer literate women is always going to outnumber the guys. But that's just my cover story.

For as long as I can I remember I had more female friends than guy ones. When it was time to play ball or run the streets or to knuckle up for the few boxing bouts I ended up in, I was all dude. But I was a write and boys don't use a lot of words unless to snap on another or to get the woman of choice unclothed. So I found myself at all kinds of tables learning all sorts of things. As there's no need to go into too many specifics, it was always good to have females to call when things went awry with the opposite sex. Because Lord knows they called me. And even if they didn't listen (They never listen) I still had a viable point of view about this other side of the world, a viewpoint that's made me learn more about the opposite sex than most of the men I know.

But here and now it starts to get complicated. As long-term boyfriends, girlfriends, and spousal considerations come into play. The twig and berries between my legs puts me one side of a line, the side where I was born to belong. But it always makes me the de facto target for generations worth of angst that I appear to be no different than on the surface. I charge all of this to the game, but I also realize that appearances can be deceiving for women who know me better. We now return to the scene, already in progress.

She tells me the story of how she married her husband of nine years after knowing him for less than two weeks. She was that sure. But she knew that that certainty was, if anything, a mere precursor to the business relationship that any marriage is. If you're looking for a father figure to sooth your ills, or a live-in playmate who doesn't kick into the pot, then you're most likely switching on your turn signal to head into the disaster lane. I wouldn't know, as I've been never been married. But I know enough about the game to know what does and doesn't work.

As many women in their 30s are stalking the herds of single prey like filmed predators on a National Geographic special, I find myself as the antelope running with the lions. I could just as easily be another target in their sights, but a shared history and philosophy grants me a kind of immunity that I will never fully be able to articulate. So I won't try. I finish what I can of the pancakes and turkey sausage I've been treated to and look forward to the complexities of the day ahead. It's always good to chat with someone here who doesn't have their head in the clouds. This kind of deliverance is right up there with the parting of the Red Sea. Here and now, I'm head out in search of Thailand on a plate, but even it's baptismal flavors can't compare to my favorite dessert of all. End of line.

Training Day

2009-07-30T12:55:00.000-07:00

The skies over Griffith Park are gray but the grass is as green as a rookie's first shift on the beat. I stand amongst blonde and sandy-haired boys between five and eight, each armed with a kid-size bag full of golf clubs. The instructor before them is a name dropper. He mentions how his buddy played with Snoop Dogg and the number of other folks he's crossed paths with in his career as a golf pro. The little boys look on and listen, following him as best as they can. They don't understand that men like their teacher are the kind of guys they'll spend time with for the rest of their lives here on Fantasy Island, that they are the next generation of the millionaire boys club. Some will even graduate to the BBC.

I am here with the lone little girl who is considering golf. She hugs her little brother every few minutes, keeping him focused as his mind wanders away from the lesson at hand. But when it's time to chip a few balls baby brother is ok, when he concentrates. The rest of the time he just hits to see where his bullets will go. I've never played a game of golf in my life but I understand its hierarchical importance. Like the game of poker, which the instructor eludes to, its where the big boys go to do business under the guise of having fun. By the time I'm an old man, at least a few of these kids will be running the world. And the rest will land on their feet, in one way or another.

I think how I would raise my own sons and what I would deem important in their education. They need to know how to play. They need to know how to fight. But most important to me are their abilities of intuition and evaluation. Can they see a thing for what it is on the surface as well as what lies beneath? Can they speak the given language while never forgetting their mother tongue? It's more important for them than it is for the little ones that surround me now, because they will most likely be a part of the same minority that I was. People think it's easier for smart kids, but in reality it's just the opposite.

I remember briefly talking with my new buddy Nyaze about the guilt that comes with surviving the game. While we didn't grow up in the worse neighborhoods, the both of us managed to elude the traps that our friends, many of whom might have been better off than us financially, fell into. There's a serious death toll in thinking back to the group of boys I started out with. Rocky and Gary, got killed. William, Rick, and Butchie went to jail. Other got girls pregnant like it was a competition. And many still abandoned their dreams by letting other and their circumstances choose for them.
I feel guilty sometimes. They seemed so much stronger than me, so much more together.

But recent events have reminded me that all is not as it seems in this Wonderland. Usually it's the loudest man who is the weakest when it counts. The one's so quick to throw it all away are the one's think their lives don't matter. Go out in blaze of glory. Collide with one of the enemy ships tearing their community to shreds. I'm glad I was made to understand that there were better strategies. Aim carefully and only fire when you have a clear shot. Everything else is chaos. End of line.

The Ballad of Darius Lovehall

2009-07-29T09:40:00.000-07:00

There's a woman who likes to call me Darius. Until now she's never known how much I dislike the moniker. I accept it from her because it comes out of love. But for me it's the equivalent of calling the person whose life the movie is based on by the fictional character's name. That probably sounds arrogant, and to a certain degree it's untrue. But in the last 12 years of my life, whenever I'm forced to talk about myself and my career as an artist, Larenz Tate's Darius Lovehall, the protagonist of the critically-acclaimed and much watch love story that is Love Jones, I'm reminded of a certain time and place that I don't want to visit anymore. Because when I do I want to live there forever.

It all went down at the Industry Cafe on Washington Blvd. The Organization of Black Screenwriters, a collective of writers both pro and amateur offering support to African Americans and their work, had a showing of Love Jones last night. I went not only because my man Tracy was spinning afterwards, but because I needed to get out of the house and see some fresh faces.

As I first saw the film at a press screening with maybe 20 other journalists back in '97, I'd never experienced the film with a large group of people, particularly a group made up of women. Watching the flick, which I've almost completely committed to memory, in the darkness of that muggy room, I for some reason felt exposed, as if something that was once my one little secret, was being revealed to a room full of strangers.

I was 21 when the movie dropped, a senior in college and arguably one of the leaders of poetry collective I'd co-founded called Cipher. I'd read alongside Nikki Giovanni, Tony Medina, Reg E. Gaines, Tracy Morris and some other well-known heavyweights out of New York. I'd never had a drink or taken in as much as a puff of herb, even though most of my friends did it on the regular. I had been writing articles to makes ends meet for a few years and often found myself stepping to mics with one of the countless poems I wrote almost daily. I was a machine, devoted to the art for the art's sake. Darius Lovehall, who'd quit his job as a journalist to write a novel, seemed like my future.

I was 100 percent certain that my life too, would both begin and end with a kiss in the rain under some urban bridge. Back then I still believed that love conquered all and that even bullets couldn't stop me from showing up in the Rotten Apple and walking away with every chip that was in play. Maybe I did in my own way. But their value shrunk faster than wool in hot water.

Watching it this time I found myself remembering all the foolish choices that I'd made on that part of the road, choices that made me, for better or worse, into a very different man. In the real world very few people care enough to chase love through a train station and they would rather burn all the evidence of the affair to ash before ever admitting that they were wrong or that they'd made a mistake. Relationships and commitments became these clumsy things full of neuroses and parental issues and secrets and lies. Maybe, in my own mind, being called a "Darius" became synonymous with a world that wasn't all that it was cracked up to be, and the painful time of lame open mics and shitty poets that changed the form from literature to dramatic monologue at the speed of light, all of which were at least in part inspired by the film itself.

But despite it all, Love Jones is still one of the best films made by an African American director since it's release, and stylistically serves as one of the templates for what I hope to accomplish as a filmmaker. Standing at the rear next to Tracy as the post-film discussion went on, I listened to the venom in the voices of frustrated aspiring writers who seemed to find some joy in picking apart one of my faves. Some of their critiques were things I agreed with. Others were strictly the work of pure hatred.

I never found my Nina. But that's a good thing. She's a flaky insecure little girl, as too many women are, especially in their 20s. Like the characters in Claude Lelouch's French classic, A Man and a Woman, I now know that Nina and Darius could never have lasted forever, just as I couldn't with me and my ex-mines. End of line.

And The Band Plays On....

2009-07-28T09:24:00.000-07:00

It's been one of those days. A client blames me for her fuck-up and then asks me to fix it. I'm sent into a house that is not my own to take photographs for evidence in an upcoming court case. There's a ten-day hold on my paycheck for reasons no one can explain to me. And the gig that's supposed to be getting back towards the style I'm accustomed to is lodged in the middle of a contractual tug of war between parties that are trying my patience. This is a night for scotch. But there is none.

So I decided to settle for the Criminal Intent I missed over the weekend. I'm flipping through Facebook and I see that my man Omari is on. An extended member of the old crew he came West and evolved: prayer beads, a full beard, etc. He's a different guy than the dorm room barber than I remember. But so am I. There's free jazz at The Mint on Pico and he wants to know if I'm down to roll. The pissed-off recluse in me tries to come with excuses about being broke and it being late, but the better part of myself grabs hold. I tell him I'm out the door in five.

I know a lot about jazz as it was to my father what hip hop was to me. My childhood was set to the sounds of Trane, Miles, Ornette Coleman, Hugh Masekela, War, George Duke, Cassandra Wilson and a list of other artists longer than the Nile River itself. Pop took me to free concert and a club or two. Later, press credentials got me into Blues Alley to see Diane Reeves, Branford Marsalis and Sun Ra. So when I got to The Mint and saw a stage full of mostly white boys in t-shirts and jeans using sheet music I turned up my nose like there was a rotting corpse somewhere.

But then I really listened. And as Omari, myself and a homegirl of his in from out of town joined the others in a booth in the corner, the music was far better than I had expected. Omari put a Dewar's for me on his tab and the oil his homegirl wore did the rest. I left the Las Vegas of my troubles behind, covering them over with the sands of an unknown [but yet in many sections certain] future.

Something is coming down the pipe that I cannot avoid, a magical thing that has nothing to do with this muck of a grind out here. I've spent the last year nurturing and protecting it like the most fragile of eggs about to hatch. But as it turns out I have a lot longer to wait than I thought. I reach out to a woman who I know will have the answer to my question. In a world full of free well are certain things destined?
Her answer is simple and direct "It is already written."

And with that I decide to walk away from the nest. The egg I cherish so much has to hatch on its own, without my warmth and energy, a pot I cannot watch or it will never boil. So I'm walking away. If it's already written them I'm just playing out the story. If I'm right all that's past and present is merely to the greatest story I've never told.

The band finishes its set just shy of midnight, which is late in these parts. As I drive down the empty streets of Mid-City, I think of the seven days ahead and what they hold. It's all this big colorful adventure for me, even if half of me would rather stay home. Chico DeBarge, during his 15 minutes, said that life has no guarantees. Some things you just have to live/love through, hoping that you got it right, even if the surface tells you it's all wrong. End of line.

Play or Hate (Me and E. Lynn)

2009-07-27T13:48:00.000-07:00

Two respected boxers, a pop star, a sex symbol and a pioneer of the bisexual relationship novel have all made their transition in less than a month. I've done my little bit of grieving for Mike, as I was actually happy that death freed him from so much of his own pain. But with E. Lynn Harris there were a different set of feelings.

I'm instantly transported to my 22nd birthday. I was fresh out of college and working at Barnes and Noble because no one else would have me. But I was also writing a novel, the book that would become my first published novel. So there, in the bookstore in the whitest part of town, where they kept most black books behind the counter in fear that negroes majoring in shoplifting would come through one of the entrances looking to take their final exam, I often bent the rules to make sure that my people knew what was hot in literature.

I faced-out book [turned them so the front cover of the jacket was showing] I moved things around so that they become more easily noticed. I tried to sell folks on the books that I loved. But the one of the only authors who didn't need me to plug them was Mr. Harris. Every 18 months he kidnapped millions of reader and shanghaied them in his work, and would continue to do so for most of the 15 years that followed.

Being young and brash and Scorpio, my attitude was that he was the man to beat. So as I penned page after page in that computer lab where I had a second job, I thought to myself that I was going to be that next guy. Four years later I'm sitting on a panel next to Harris himself. By then he had put my book on his website and give me the first quote for the back cover. He invited me to contribute to the anthology he co-edited. And he shook my hand like a peer and not just another dude.

I watched the way he stood his latest book up in front of him so that anyone taking pictures would give him free promotion, and I envied the frenzy the folks at my publishing house made before every one of his releases. I hated because, as usual, I was walking around feeling like I was running out of time, that if I didn't blow up then and there that all was lost. He had millions. He had crib. When he went on TV and radio people actually read his book.

So when my girl McZier posted the notice about his death, the first thing that went through my mind was that I had been foolish to compare my path with his. Yeah had it all. But he didn't get to really enjoy it for very long. As as the nonexistent cause of his death has created a cloud of speculation about what took him under, I don't even know how he was living healthwise for the bulk of that time.

It's no different that any rapper who hated DMX or Biggie, Pac or Aaliyah. You apply all this energy in how you measure up with someone else in the short term when in the long run you might end up better off than the man of the moment. Bob says it's all about who left standing after all the others fall. And I think he's right.

E. Lynn Harris the man leaves a lot behind him. But his journey on this side has come to an end. No matter what I do with the rest of my life, I still have the ability to act and reason and explore. I didn't get into any of it for the money or the fame. And when my little bit of notoriety arrived I knew how to act because of how my parents had raised me. I met my deadlines, kept as many appointments as I could, and accomodated folks to the best of my ability. And the river keeps running ahead of me , the bulk of my future too far away to be ID'd by the short sight that comes with human experience. So I measure my strokes and try to control my breath. The rest is up to upstair. R.I.P. E. Lynn and thanks for everything. End of Line.

The Art of Easing

2009-07-25T08:13:00.001-07:00

It's 8am. Do you know where your panties are? This debate is going in the head of some young woman in some bedroom somewhere. But I'm more concerned about what's in the fridge. I am housesitting at the compound that was my first home here. Lulu the poodle is at my feet. Lovie and Rascal, the two cats I'm charged with protecting against the hungry coyotes in the hills outside are safe and sound.

Oil goes into a skillet I know well, followed by fresh minced garlic and a little butter. I'm making my signature potatoes with a pan fried piece of swai and some orange juice. The plate will go next to the laptop on the deck. The birds and insects up here are a jukebox full of songs. I put on Willie Colon and Hector LaVoe's "Aguanile" as it reminds me of El Cantante, Spanish Harlem and Baba Steve's house on a lazy Saturday. It's akin to when I was a little boy and Saturdays meant Pop playing jazz records and cleaning the furniture while Mom made stacks of pancakes taller than me. I wandered the length and area of that condo much I've done every place where I've resided since.

A college buddy of mine who made beats once produced this song called Friday that was about the many different lives one can lead from the beginning of the weekend to its midpoint: walks of shame, early morning afterglow, hangover, heartbreak, etc. It's crazy to think that one of my favorite hip hop songs of all time is a track that maybe ten people heard before it was eventually lost altogether.

I should spend my weekends wandering the LA landscape in search of the niches where I belong. But as it takes so much effort to get anywhere with parking and the great distance between things [at least in comparison to New York] I usually prefer to just sit still. This weekend there are no kids here. There are no complaints about the current movie crew, no bickering with asshole neighbors or the smell of Newports being chain smoked by the guy with five kids living in the house his father used to own. But it's short-lived. The onslaught will continue. It always does.

Monday will mark three years of singledom, a milestone for me as ex-serial monogamist. The hiatus wasn't as much the product of some intentional plan as it was about knowing both what was for me and what wasn't. Is it to better to be alone than be with someone and feel alone? My answer is an abundant yes. So many things glimmer in the depths of the dating pool. But that doesn't make them diamonds. If you can't have an introductory conversation without playing games or having brain overload because I asked you about something other than reality TV, celebrity gossip and what you want to talk about then there is no room in my inn, plain as day.

If I were some other guy, like the ones who I had beef with in high school that now behave as if we were best buddies to the end on Facebook, or like my man Marcus, who I've known since the third grade, who despite owning property of his own still lives in the house he grew up in, or my man Robin who teaches on the university level, then comes home and listens to music or watches the game until he falls out, I always feel like things would be easier, though I fully understand that that's not the truth.

Here and now I have to steal moments instead of hours or days to keep my sanity. I live for a series of photographs that have yet to be taken. My whole life I've always been a rush to get where I was going, so much so that I've left my wallet on the counter, or the TV on, or I rushed through a conversation with someone I had no idea that I was never going to see again. I'd been so busy just trying to get there that I almost forgot that what's it's really about is the trip itself.

So here and now I breathe in and breathe out, flushing my frustrations to the rear of everything else for just long enough for me to enjoy my meal and drown in the freshly-squeezed sunlight here on Fantasy Island, anxiously awaiting the day that my plane will touch down and finally take me home. End of line.

Break Up

2009-07-23T07:02:00.001-07:00

I've been watching a lot of music videos lately. Most of it is that I haven't had access to a music channel in a good six months. When you're trying to write movies for the 18-34 demographic you need to know what's hot, even if it annoys you. As I was explaining to my boy O just last night, you have to speak their language. Each day I'm more certain that Black music, as it should be, is slowly moving into a dialect that I will barely know hot to speak by the time I'm 40.

A lot of folks in my generation are ascribing blame as to why mainstream hip hop/R&B [Because it's all one thing right about now] has become this killing ground of mediocrity. Take a look at the video above. For me, the singing and rhymes are just there, necessary pieces in the puzzle of mainstream radio format these days. I don't know what some of these young boys and girls would do if they ever had to hit it a capella sans DJ, DAT, etc. Some of the guys who came out of my eighth grade talent could take down half of today's gold and platinum sellers. Choreography is poorly rehearsed. Some of the shots don't make sense and there's so much product placement that I'm not the only one who mistook it for a commercial. The music has completely become the bandwagon producer's medium. That the one part of the work on the song that's actually...interesting. The director also knew how to pinch pennies, as an auteur must in these days and times.

But in the end, it's a video that got done. And as I hoping to taking on some music video projects after this short I'm planning. I need to know more and more about what I want going in. I had a dream job interview with someone I considered a God in my youth. And the first out of his mouth is that he remembered me from that damn TV show that still gets me more props than anything I've done since. My Dad is on Facebook now. It'll be interesting to see how that turns out.

But maybe the most important of the day came late into the night, when a sister-in-arms talked with me about whether or not to leave the Apple in search of the stability and peace of mind that my former town is running short on these days. The craziest thing about the convo is that she's going through it almost exactly the way I did, except my friends wanted me to go. They knew I was out of outs and that the silly dreams I had in place to sustain me were just that. Including myself, she will be the fifth person in our little media circle to jump ship. And think it's the time for it, for whatever reason.

My boy Chris and I were rapping about the changes in the film biz and how sooner than not NYC and LA may lose a lot of their importance as media hubs due to the power of cheaper technology, state incentives and the crumbling of so many of the institutions that had young punks like myself armed with discounted tickets blowing into town looking to make a name for themselves. But probably not. End of line.

Crenshaw

2009-07-22T12:22:00.000-07:00

How can I put this without revealing far too much about one of the oddest situations I've ever lived through? I can so I'll file it down to the most basic of terms. Some acted shady and got caught after a long time. They told it to the judge and the judge all but laughed at them. Though I was nor plaintiff nor defendant the mentioned proceedings ended up in my favor, which is a good thing.

It took a drive down Crenshaw Blvd for me to finally stumble across what passes for summer in LA. A teenage girl supervises a good seven little brothers and cousins as they make their way to an ice cream truck. Half-clothed women in daisy dukes and halter tops push their occupied strollers in an out of the Fox Hills Mall, where Trey used to work (like 20 years ago). The smell of cooking pork and beef outside of the rib shack makes me thing of the cookouts I'll miss back home and the time I set up a grill in the courtyard of the brownstone where I used to hang my hat.

The bulk of my mind is coiled around a contract to sign and another I dream of signing. There are to-do lists and plans, dinners I've had to reschedule and the general call of the grind, the one I was write about and live for, one that will always be a part of me. A tall girl of 13 from the apartment building across the street waves excitedly when she hears me bumping Drake's "Best I've Ever Had", as if a grown-up like me shouldn't be playing something so current. I remember thinking that myself. Time flies.

I'm listening to new songs because they remind me old beats, beats that I remember reminded my dead of old songs. He told me that a day would come where the culture of my youth would be for sale and that the day would come when the young boys and girls whose music was above reproach would become victims to time just as his did. But whereas most would find this sad, for me it's just one more reason to be live and love beyond the limit.

As I watch the 50-something man do a shuffle dance on the corner of Crenshaw and Adams while a white-haired Korean man pointed towards him to motorists and passersby I was reminded not only that my life could be a whole lot worse, but that the blessing of awareness is that most people just don't get it. End of line.

Bob

2009-07-20T07:57:00.000-07:00

My good friend Bob is the one guy in the world who I know will always give me an honest opinion. A critical acclaimed writer in both the news and comic book fields he's been teaching me the rules of the game for close to a decade now. He deals with people mostly by phone and email, so even though we were less than 20 minutes away from each other I haven't actually seen him in a good three to four years.

Yet when I moved out here, it's been he who calls to check in on me more than anyone else, just as it was he who took the time to edit my submission to the now defunct Esquire annual fiction competition a decade ago. I didn't win, but I did get the first of the billion quotables I now have from him. "I wouldn't have taken the time if I didn't think you had the talent," he said. I was 23 then. I locked down the deal for my first novel just after I turned 24.

So when it was time to get a read on my new pilot, my third piece of writing for television to date, I knew that he would tell me what was what, even if it took him six months and resulted in me hating his guts for eternity. That's the thing about Bob. He doesn't care about money or possessions or your ego. It's about the work. And when it comes to that he either likes it or it doesn't. Was I headed back to the drawing board or on my way to the next round in the long grinds of the pitching and selling racket?

I wasn't even thinking about it when the call started. Some good news had come in on Friday and I was still nursing it, so much so that I'd almost forgotten that I'd given him the script and synopsis. And as we've found much humor in the pundit aftermath surrounding the fall of our former flag, we didn't even get to it as a subject for awhile. So when the words "So I finally read your pilot" hit the air, it's kind of like that A&R who you were praying got your demo tape in the mail (circa '92), finally dials your number. Whatever his answer was it was going to be simple.

"It's good," he says, before hitting me with both compliments and concerns. The age difference between us gives him a kind of objectivity about things that I have to develop. I've seen it with my father and other folks in middle age. You've seen so much that it doesn't evoke emotion as much as it does understanding. We talk about actors and plotlines. His sarcastic comments mirror things that I thought in my head during the process. He knows what actors work and the ones that don't. If I could bring one writer onto a show of mine with me he, Glass or Chelle would be in a really close top three. But as the other two already have jobs in the biz he's my best bet. Now if my manager loves it and gets it into magic hands, I'll be having Dom with pancakes come Valentine's Day. Just kidding. It'll be Macallan or Blue Label ;)

In the meantime I'm back in Rocky mode. I started with the pushups this week. Next week I'll add the sun salutations. Then after that it'll be back on the bike for daily 45 minutes rolls through the new hood. I should look like the man I left behind by Labor Day, too late for mating season but just in time for my own sanity. I broiled a small piece of fish for breakfast. There's a long day ahead and I can use the protein. End of line.

Sunday Morning

2009-07-19T12:28:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's been the hours I've been working since I've gotten here, but I can't seem to sleep past nine out here. Sure I'm getting older, which means that I require less sleep, but I rather miss the days of late night grind sessions and coming down in the quiet of night to the sounds and frames of one of a DVD or a C-Movie on Cinemax. But LA, unlike the lands from which I came, goes to bed early. This is a town where they worship the sun in every sense of the verb.

So I'm not surprised when my eyes open just past eight. I've already done my errands for the weekend so the day is free and clear. If I am going to burrow myself into the list of projects slated for the week ahead, I should at least see the sky first. So I decide to go for a walk.

It's a simple stroll down to the gas station for a bottle of OJ and a pack of strawberry Pop Tarts. A girl of maybe 22 walks past me in a pair of daisy dukes and three of four year-olds toddling behind her. A German Shepherd with a collar and tags wanders aimlessly down Jefferson Avenue either trying to find or just get some exercise.

The parking lot at the Snooty Fox, dive motel extraordinaire to the hood, is beginning to empty. Whether they're hookers and johns, or people who live at home buying a night of privacy, what's been done in the dark turns to ash in the light of a new day.
My first urge is to get a hold of some turkey bacon, fry up some potatoes and commune with the spirits of good living for the rest of the day. Another part of me wants to get back to reading books before my brain congeals. The rest of me is still in stasis, waiting for something to happen. It's a good morning in LA.

I make the potatoes without the bacon and watch Jeff Goldblum on Law and Order: Criminal Intent. I keep developing the plot of my next spec script, an adaptation of my most recent novel, as I move about the house. I'm into draft two of this feature for this producer, waiting to hear about my pilot, prepping for a ghost job, making notes on directing this short and waiting to see if the offer of a lifetime comes to fruition for me. I wrote a poem yesterday meant for tomorrow. I wonder if it'll ever get read. Life is life. Love is love. End of line.

Hooray for Bollywood!

2009-07-16T13:42:00.000-07:00

I am being paid to weave an oversize cargo van in and out of LA traffic. Armed only with my phone's GPS and enduring a seemingly never-ending stream of calls from my superiors I'm doing my best not to complain. Vendors are calling me about checks that need to be delivered, even though I have less juice than a dead battery in the matter.

There are also 27 boxes of equipment that need to be taken to the Van Nuys heliport.
As I wheel the empty white van from place to place I think of my father's father, who did this for a living. Being behind the wheel can be a Zen experience. All you have to do is get the cargo there in one piece without hurting yourself or the vehicle. Sure there are obstacles and plenty of traffic, but it's all about taking your mind to another place, or in my case, another time.

"I have a buddy of mine whose a DP (Director of Photography)," Tim, the aerial camera tech, explains to me. "Michael Bay was one of his PAs (Production Assistants). Now he's Michael Bay and my buddy is still a DP"

This is meant to remind me that there is no defined road to becoming a working filmmaker. Though I was being paid to help him assemble those 27 boxes of parts, I could tell that there was a respect there, that somehow this dude, who talks about $50,000 to his broker on the phone like it's nothing, saw something in me. The next thing I know I'm underneath a helicopter checking the nuts and bolts securing the rig for the aerial camera that will pan across the desert in tomorrow's shoot.

Sure I'm tired. Sure I got up at six and drove through traffic only to learn that the checks I was sent to deliver wouldn't be ready for hours. Sure a friend of mine almost quit defending my honor against the verbal attacks of an ornery Indian coordinator. Sure a buddy of mine has told me a story about how Bollywood films are known for exploiting their workers.

One part of me asks why I'm doing this. That's the part of me that thinks he knows everything. The rest of me makes notes on what to do and not to do when it's my turn, which I'm happy to learn will be far sooner than I ever might have thought. I look forward to directing. I hope it fits me as warmly and completely as the written word, its arms wrapped around me like the perfect woman.
It is in these thoughts where I live while my body moves the van and I toward the next destination.

I think about the countdown to my temporary flight from this place: a wedding, interview sessions, the shipping of my things and what I hope to be the beginning of breathing for the first time here in this now not-so-new place. My sister loves her birthday gift. My other sister loves the fact that we can chop it up about movies and almost always agree. I find peace of mind in single moments like these, flashes from a bulb that shed light on the truth of what lies beneath all of this driving, lifting and slaving in the name of a flick where one Indian guy chases away six buffed white supremacists after destroying an '88 Accord with a metal bat. Hooray for Bollywood! End of line.

Lost In Translation

2009-07-14T10:34:00.000-07:00

I am heading north, casually weaving through traffic on a Tuesday. There is a man to my left yelling into a cellphone in Hindi. Behind me a secretary feverishly orders cars through a website. And the boss man at 11 'o clock has just picked up the phone to speak more Hindi. I am in the middle of it all, awaiting orders and an endless amount of driving in the name of production assistance, fueled by nothing but trail mix and my Ipod, which I am glad to finally have some new headphones for. This is another stop on the road to Nirvana, one where I have learned to be thankful for having something to do each day other than wait. This business is all about waiting. And I have no patience. Hence, I'm training myself to get over my limitations.

I spent most of the weekend safety-proofing a 10 million dollar house for scenes with were shooting there. There were four of us, all brothers and all about getting the job done. In between there are naps and trips to craft services where the lady on snack detail has offered slices strawberries and Cool Whip, my own nectar of the gos so to speak. Indian women move about in sari and bindis, speaking their native tongue with their own folks, as we, the minorities here, do the same. A brush fire creates clouds of smokes on a hillside a good five to ten miles away. It's over 100 degrees and we're all covered in sunscreen. That somehow led to this, my third job on this project as van driver. I will be shooting around the LA area for most of the next 72 hours. In between I'll get to work on the second draft of that script I'm doing for hire and figure out a way to rid the house of a rather pesky moth and spider problem. First comes the fogger. Then comes the sache full of bay leaves. But I'll have to figure out a way to get the cast of characters out of the house first.

The last few days have been the worse where the "I Hate LA" mantra hasn't been running through my skull. I've switched out some of my more gangster playlists with love songs and soul classics. I've been cooking at least once a day and dreaming up ideas for what to make for the housewarming I want to kick off around Labor Day. I am seeing myself watching my homegirl walk down one aisle while my godbrother goes down another on the same day next month. And there are all my reasons for making a trip crosstown, to see the friends I left behind and to wrap a bow around some unfinished business.

The thing about working this set is that you learn a lot about what not to do. You've got two languages being spoken, a first time director who is apparently a big deal in India, a bunch of guys who don't speak English but have taken to groping both male and female crew members, and a whole lot of disorganization in the name of the fiasco that any production can become if the pots aren't watched two carefully. Yet, I'm somewhat Zen about it all. This is not my show. There are not my moves. I am merely a grunt here collecting a check to float me for a few weeks. When I see it that way I can push past everything else. When I see if that way I can live freely, one breath at a time. On the way here I think I actually smiled once or twice. That's progress. End of line.

Love In Lalaland

2009-07-10T12:02:00.000-07:00

"You need a woman out there," MTM explains to me over the phone. The thing I like the most about my friend back East is that neither of us like to beat around the bush. This statement hit the air not after a discussion about recent blogs. To her, I might see my whole life in a different perspective after jumping up and down with a cutie of choice. My mind starts to play with the idea: drinks or dinner, Netflix at the crib, a tawdry tryst in the early hours following some house party, or some extremely tacky episode in the back of my ride that I might exit feeling both ashamed and far too old to indulge in.

I imagine the woman. It's like playing with Mrs. Potato Head except the frame is an hourglass somewhere between five feet and six. Long legs or thick thighs, big breasts and/or ample derrieres, alluring eyes etc. I play around with dimensions and hair colors. I examine the timbre of her voice, inserting lines of dialogue as if it's all some script I'm writing here in my cell. There are so many permutations that could work...anywhere but here.

As LA culture is extremely high school, a endless stream of nondescript faces in the hall, women here, or at least those that I've met, are all looking for whoever makes the face of the school paper that week. Their accomplishments don't have to be substantial or even truthful. They just have to be believable long enough for the designated woman to feel like he's a catch she should go after. The truth is for the post-game wrap-up and the divorce lawyers. Everything outside of that is one big mind game. And I generally have little interest in playing.

To reiterate an earlier blog, none of it is personal. It's a town where most of the folks showed up hoping to be somebody. And they feel like being somebody starts with being next to the right somebody. So if you're not the type to boast your accomplishments to the heavens or overcompensate with an automobile more expensive than most people's houses, then the game is severely rigged against you. The outings are seemingly more important than the interactions, which is the opposite of Brooklyn. If you don't have the dough to at least go somewhere where the two of you can be seen long enough for her chat about with her homegirls the next day or week then you might as well throw the towel in. I've heard many versions of this evaluation before I came to it myself.

So it's not as simple as MTM might think. And moreover, until I'm in a place where my godsister won't complain about the soundtrack of my hump and grind, it's a dead issue. Plus there are too many people with roommates out here. I'm trying to avoid anymore of that painful awkwardness that comes with running into someone else on the way to the john post the afterglow. It's cool for your 20s but in my 30s...bah humbugg.

So looking for companionship in the valley of the paper dolls is like looking for an R&B singer these days who can actually sing. I'd rather go after the money. Because just like Oliver Stone said in his script for Scarface "First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women." It's the truth of all truths when it comes to love in the time of a recession. Make note and make it happen. End of line.

What A Job Is

2009-07-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

So it's somebody's birthday, and as my sister's car is on loan to someone else, it is I who must drive her down the street to The Cork for a birthday party. Having just been there the week before, I knew what to expect...well sort of. As I took a seat at the bar and armed myself with a Jameson on the rocks, a quick survey of both the room and most of the guests with the birthday girl, I quickly saw that this was not a straight people's affair. No big deal for me. Translation: Look, but there will be no touching. That's it and that is all.

Someone wants to finance one of my short films with me at the helm. This is my second potential directing project in a number of weeks. In my own mind it was supposed to go the other way. I saw myself writing scripts for at least a few years before I ever stood behind a camera and yelled 'action'. But someone out here whose opinion I trust, one of God's many favored children that I've intersected with, reminded me to let things go in their own order and not try to control it all.

As I sat in the bar and enjoyed my drink with one eye on the rear of one of the one female bartender's jeans and the other on the second lady barkeep, an Israeli woman who I swore was a sista (or at least Puerto Rican) the theme and the night and the place and all my expectations faded like snapshot in long-term sunlight. Maybe I should apply such Zen thinking to the rest of my life. But the ten thousand dollar chip on my shoulder makes that all the more difficult.

I do all I can day in and out to stick with the plan. In a matter or weeks I'll be basking under the sun in a different state while letting my microphone do most of the heavy lifting. But it can't get here fast enough. For one, I've broken the rule Tonya established for me before I even got here: "Never remain in LA for more then three months without a break". Two, I need to get all that I left behind out of my mother's dining room. Three, I want to take a sixty minute shower and then dry myself by running around my crib naked like I did when I was three, just because I can, and that hasn't happened yet.

I've been told by those who landed here in a somewhat similar fashion that this is all a rite of passage for anyone who wants in, that my break in communication with those in the Ivory tower of entertainment wheeling and dealing is par for course, no matter who you were when you visited or worked from out of town. If it weren't for MTM and Anjeanette, the Dervish, Gaines, Rich and a host of others, I might have driven back the way from whence I came months ago. But now I'm pressing on, not only because it's the only thing that makes sense, but more importantly because all of my better judgment says that I should.

My father and my sisters had a conference in the minivan about my future. My baby sister thinks that I'll marry a girl from out West who won't be able to fry chicken. My big little sister knows how much I'm missing home and my family, as this was only the third 4th of July I've spent away from them my whole life. Rich reminds me of how unhappy I was in Brooklyn that last year, and Pegram thinks I can't quit because the work I'm doing isn't for own gratification but for something larger, to disseminate certain messages to designated people through words and ideas. All of the opinions weight a ton, but so does an oxygen tanks when your diving into the depths.

When I write, the ache behind my eyes retreats. I elongate my spine and stop breathing like I'm in the third act of a horror film. And then I focus, hands hovering over the lettered keys as if possessed by spirits from the other side. And then I do the job, no matter how big or small it might be, because it's what I was put here for.

So as I talk with the waitress from Tel Aviv, quietly admiring the way she looks in leggings and how she loosely reminds me of one of my old bosses, I decided not to complain anymore. I'm going to try really hard to see this all through without anymore whining. It's not like such blathering makes the doors and gates open any faster. It also drains energy better used for something that matters. So I'm trying quiet. Will let you know how it goes. End of line.

Diamonds

2009-07-08T09:55:00.000-07:00

I've been blessed to make a few friends out here in cyberspace, souls who appreciated my words long before they had a personal connection to them. One of the is a woman who I could always count on for long-form reactions to what I had to say. It was her words, both directly and indirectly, that inspired me to start this new blog and that reminded that my only real enemy was fear.

When you make a decision to be a writer, you're deciding to put yourself on public display 24/7. Whether shrouded in fiction or full on facts, when you write about yourself, each and every reader owns a piece of you bought in exchange for their adoration with your words. It's the healthiest kind of co-dependency and the way that I've survived in this racket for nearly two thirds of my life.

But as what you love becomes your business, you make changes and adjustments. You stop some things for awhile in the name of better maintaining others. You do things that you might not have done earlier on or won't do again. You come to many crossroads and make many choices along the path that is your life story. And you have to live with what you choose.

It occurs to me from time to time that I am cut from a very select roll of fabric. My name is on the relatively small list of folks who manage to become many things along the way. Thinking and fantasizing is one thing, but to build homes brick by brick over and over takes courage, endurance and the understanding that nothing lasts forever. No one fortress you build can keep the Big Bad Wolf out for eternity.

My choices have shielded me from many misfortunes and yet doomed me to others. One such choice led me to a place where I decided that I was going to wall myself off from the world and find mediocrity in the closest salaried position. I had tried to rub way my face with and eraser, only to learn that my soul was sketched with permanent ink. I fell in love with a girl who used me for target practice as she prepared herself for a showdown she would never be ready for. It wasn't personal. But I took it that way. Wisdom and understanding are two snakes twisting around a sword.

My journey as an artist has always been about beauty, about painting moody and honest portraits that I could burn into the brains of my supporters. My memories are snapshots of all the things that jumped out from the background: that song on the radio three apartments over, the different in timbre and echo made from a nine versus a shotgun, the difference between my drunk and my high etc.

But though I've continued to work, I now see that there are parts of me that have gotten rusty from misuse. Or maybe I'm just gunshy out here because I only speak basic LA. But as creative miner I think I now know the diamonds I'm after on this particular heist, stones more valuable than even my imagination could have fathomed. Watching the universe move changes you. And there's no going back after the first time. End of line.

Mann vs. Me

2009-07-03T18:25:00.000-07:00

Michael Mann, Carl Franklin and David Fincher are three of the few directors whose work I'll support on name alone. Mann, who has been the cinematic master of crime films for more than 20 years, just dropped Public Enemies with Johnny Depp, his highly-publicized biopic of the life of infamous 30s bank robber, John Dillinger. My homegirl Tramble asked me to roll with her and her homegirl, Karen to see it at The Grove. So I went.

The thing that makes Mann so great to me is that he focuses on atmosphere and interaction. His work is about both distance and violent collision. Whether it's Robert Deniro's Neal MacCaulay and Pacino's Vincent Hannah in Heat, Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise on Collateral or Daniel Day Lewis and Madeleine Stowe in Last of the Mohicans, his work is about contrast, about focusing life's lens until it gives you the sharpest picture possible. If there's one director I'd like to be like it's him. Add Johnny Depp to the mix, an actor who makes himself believable as anyone or anything, and what you end up with is a flick that illustrates true film making far beyond the over-CGi'd cliches that draw the masses out to the multiplex these days.

A baby boomer like my parents, Mann is a guy who takes pride in both knowing and having been an Average Joe kind of guy. He drove a cab. He has close friends and contacts in the underworld. He goes above and beyond the norm in establishing motives and backstories. He's a novelist who tells his stories on screen. But when I think about getting from here to there my biggest worry is that I won't have enough time, that I got here too late just like I did in New York, having missed all the action and fireworks that defined an era.

Post the flick, I found myself chopping it up with the two ladies who I hope to one day consider my friends. But they too are in another place, a part of the system here and wired in the ways of Black Hollywood in as many ways as I am not. When you're the new kid for the second time around, with only a handful of mid-level allies and a juice tank that's drier than the Mojave, you wonder whether you're destined for the greatest that others seem to feel that you have or if you're just another deluded dope scratching and surviving to catch a train that pulled off before you even got to the station.

Maybe it's the fact that it's the 4th of July and I'm on the other side of the world from my entire family. Maybe it's the pit bull that followed me home last night that I couldn't take in, even though I wanted to. Maybe it's the fact that I haven't done a push-up in months and that I'm yet to have as much as my own desk to work at. Or maybe it's just that just like before, it's a hell of a lot harder than I was planning on it being.

But in my own way I'm already living past all of this. I'm in the place where I have to be polite to the two-faced hustlers and opportunists who will have my number on speed dial the minute I turn up in the trades. I'm trying to figure out how to raise children who will actually see and spend time with me as I navigate the time-consuming labyrinth that makes up this new game. I want to get rich and still create on my own terms, which most will tell you is rarely possible.

Sure it all comes in steps. I already have some folks in mind for my team and further know for certain others that I can never work with again. Most importantly I know that I have to be five times as good as any Caucasian while working with only a fifth of their resources. It's the price of the ticket, as my Dad is fond of saying, the sacrifice you're willing to make to win the game of music chairs that is the entertainment business.

Right now I need some points on the board more than I need air. Right now I need to look up into the clear Cali sky and see a twinkling reminder that I'm not chasing my tail for the sake of having something to do. I have to believe in something that I'd never understand, and look good doing it. Because out here all eyes are on you the minute you make that first splash. Its ripples travel outward towards infinity, brushing across the make or breakers hiding in the shadows. I've got two bullets left and the bad guys are all over the place. But I've been here before and prevailed. The game may have changed, but I'm still the same. End of line.

Babel

2009-07-02T07:24:00.001-07:00

I am wearing the tightest pair of pants in the history of costume design. There is no exaggeration here. Sarah, my lovely wardrobe lady, only had a 36 and I'm a 38. As the only Black extra and actor for the day, I have a been given uniform and badge but no gun or nightstick, and the director has conveniently positioned me at the very edge of the shot, so that the back of my head is the only thing seen. The director, who keeps yelling that I need to take two step forward toward my mark, seems to be doing it on the fly: no shot lists, a elderly man in a turban who's telling him what to do because he's obviously the money man, and a sense of disorganization that makes the BET Awards look like the Kennedy hit. This is the life of an extra. I'm so glad that my life's ambitions have led me behind the camera and not in front of it.

Here, on the Left Coast, I have just been given another sign that the gods threw me clear of danger when all hell broke loose for me in Brooklyn last year. As the unbreakable tower call VIBE, the tower I dreamt of climbing for most of my adolescent and early 20s, has crumbled, the final domino in a long chain. I never got there I wanted to be there, but as hindsight is 20/20, I'm glad that I didn't.

I was 23 the first time I walked through VIBE's doors as an employee for their then laughed at online division. They had us situated toward the far edge of editorial, the darker side of the world. There were seven of us on the bridge: Keith Murphy, my boss, Mark Allwood, Jermaine Hall, Miguel Burke, Mike Hauswirth and the floating member of our team, Richard Louissaint. Rich, Wood and Murph would become three of my best friends in the five boroughs.

Our job was news updates and online content before most people were online. VIBE, the print mag, looked down their noses at us. We rarely got freelance assignments and when we did they were Mick Mouse. It was us against the world. And it was hilarious!
I remember when Bonz Malone, one of my heroes and mentors, comically destroyed the credibility of our magazine's baby publication, BLAZE, by clowning then editor-in-chief, Jesse Washington's statement "We do research in bodegas". Sick of the overexposure, Wood and I stomped a copy of Sisqo's "Unleash The Dragon" into a million pieces to Mike's almost painful amusement, and played Outkast's Aquemini everyday, just to make sure that the South from which we came was heard loud and clear.

Together we learned who really wrote script for cinematic disaster-piece called Butter. We argued every corner of the hip hop universe and got drunk at open bars every night, and then went to the movies on weekends. We had all the new music first and a lists full of contacts for anything we wanted. I even conned Vivid into sending us a box of porn under the pretense of interviewing Mr. Marcus [He called me but I never got a chance to actually call him back] That was 1999.

In the years that followed Jermaine and Murph would become stars at KING Magazine. Miguel got married and moved back to Houston. Wood went to J-School. Rich went to grad school for an MFA and became a photographer. Mike continued his plot to take over the world...from Queens, and I wrote books. Our same seats will be there until they dissemble the whole thing, but I think all of our hearts left a long time ago. All I wanted to be in the world was a staff writer for VIBE. But I never got there. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was the best thing for me.

Back in year one I remember telling Murph that what we did would come to an end at some point. White boy writers would learn the culture and eventually pretend to know more about it than we did. The labels would shoot themselves in the foot. An article that year, speaking on the rise of Eminem, predicted that in 20 years Black America would be on to some other art form, that hip hop would be one thing burn to ash in the cultural fire that keeps this country warm through the winters of its discontent. Murph said that that would never happen. It hurts me that I was so right.

Had I stayed in the Rotten Apple, the fight for my livelihood might have been all the more uphill. I would have been one more pigeon in the park, fighting over the crumbs thrown our way by old men looking for a new vein to drain in exchange for cash.

As I peel out of my cop pants in the parking lot, I think about all of the folks who are sad about VIBE's demise. But I watched it die a slow and painful death from the inside. Some went before the firing squad. Others tied the noose around their own necks. Some fought the good fight until the last bomb went off over Baghdad. The rest of us graduated, in one way or another, onto surprisingly bigger and better things.

There is more Hindi spoken on this set than English, as it is a Bollywood film. I have seen how a proper turban is wet and folded around the skull. An Indian crew member thought it was ok to slap a sista working as an extra on the ass. My boy J, representing Harlem, yoked him up in a heartbeat and told him what he wouldn't stand for when it came to his queens. My godsister and her boss, the two other flies in the buttermilk, are working 12 hours days to keep this foreign production ticking. But no one seems to understand each other. For the business to be called communications, no one seems to get the message...until it's too late. End of line.

Chasing Salamanca Mitchell

2009-07-01T09:35:00.000-07:00

It's weird when you see something in real life that reminds you of something you imagined, when the words you put on a page come to life before your eyes. She is maybe 5'4 with legs longer than I-95, brown hair with highlights pinned behind her ears and a dusting of red freckles across her cheeks and nose.

She looks to be exactly the age Salamanca Mitchell would be, a woman loyal enough to her man to wait for him for the seven years he was inside, a woman defiant enough to stand up against a man an entire world feared, her own father. Many of the women I created were a reflection of those who would later enter my life in reality. Seeing this stranger at a bank branch I've never visited in the neighborhood where I wanted to move but didn't somehow tells me that something's coming down the pipe, though I'm not sure what it is.

The past few days have melded together as a combination of everything and nothing. I am avoiding the onslaught of Mike coverage as I'm tired of revisiting the lost. As a culture we seem to get high on death. It's the only way that we'll notice change. As the energy that was once Mike is being spread across the planet like ashes in a lake, I'm thinking about what's next. Maybe that's my problem. I'm always living in the future.

I spent Friday night at The Cork Bar and Grill, a neighborhood watering hole where you pay for each item as it arrives at your table, where black label is eight bucks and everyone seems to know everyone else. I sat there under the surprisingly well-lit room listening to Parliament on the jukebox and think about day ahead when the bartenders might know my name, where I might choose to celebrate one small success or the next. The next night it was on to the meet market T.G.I. Fridays in Inglewood, a country for old men in search of any pair of legs that might let them get between, and the potentially-closeted homeboys who came to watch.

As my homegirl Toya, in town from Brooklyn, and I looked on, I was quickly reminded of who I was and where I didn't want to be on the other side of the 50. There was a laugh to be had in the middle-aged sista in the sweatpants with the playboy bunny on them and the fake white Louis V bag with bunnies to match who was constantly glancing over to see if I was up for buying her a round. Sorry baby. No dice.

By Tuesday I was in a tight polyester police uniform playing an extra on the set of a Bollywood film for 65 bucks a day and thinking about my follow-up meeting with my producers. I'm waiting to hear about my pilot, waiting to move into my place, waiting to start this book job and waiting for the days when I won't have to wait anymore, at least not like this.

And with that my mind returns to the bank teller in the four-inch heels and the red pencil skirt, an omen of both past and future. Her only words were to tell me that the bank wouldn't be open for another 15 minutes. She didn't even see me when I was sitting right next to her. It's not about her though. It's about the idea, the concept of the character she might play on my own stage in some alternate reality, an intersection taking flight down some other runway meant for some other plane heading for a fantasy island I can no longer afford, even if the ticket were paid in full. I already made the choice. And I know why I made it. End of line.

Mike Night

2009-06-26T11:35:00.000-07:00

Something had been in the air all week. Around Tuesday I found myself watching the video for "Scream" over and over on Youtube. The next day I couldn't get "They Don't Really Care About Us" out of my head, even though it wasn't one of my favorite cuts. My sister and I didn't sleep on the separate mattresses in her studio the night before. Then Thursday came.

My meeting with two producers went long. My bank tried to put a ten-day hold on a check I needed so I took it back, but left my ATM card in the machine. There was an error with the prepaid card I bought that almost made me late getting my homeboy's kids from summer camp. Then, with the kids in the back my car ran out of gas two blocks from the closest station. I hit the hazards raises the hood and coralled the younglings over to get a gas can from some Armenians who were apparently renovating their place themselves. As I filled the can with the uneasy children looking on, a dude filling up told me that it said on the radio that Michael Jackson, the "King of Pop", was dead of a heart attack.

I didn't know how to take this. But as I was fearing a lawsuit or excommunication from my homeboy for potentially stranding his kids, I pushed it away, even as the amount of Mike running on radio stations confirmed it for sure.

Hours later I got a text from my longtime online friend, Ms. Tye, who felt moved to check on me after the news. I told her that I was in denial, but fine. He had suffered so long and in ways that even his unmatched success couldn't make up for. I was happy that he as gone as if meant that he might finally find peace.

But then I turned on VH-1 Soul and they were playing Dirty Diana, a clip I'd loved and seen millions of times. But this was different. Watching the moves and the atmosphere and the near perfect legs on that faceless woman in the limo, it was now somehow different. These were now home movies of someone lost, a being I had known my whole life. The Mike Dynasty was now in the rearview.

The tears that violently exploded from my eyes weren't as much about his departure as they were about the world he'd left behind, where we have to live without him.

We projected so much of ourselves on the life of Mike, a troubled but extremely talented boy who created a life composed of the circuses and carnivals he never got to experience in his youth, that we forgot that underneath it all there was something ridiculously Divine, a universality of the human spirit that turned the Tower of Babel into dust. I cried because he is one of the last of an age where talent mattered more than anything else, and where artistic integrity reigned high above corporate control, celebrity journalism an technology obsession.

My first Mike memory is of spending my allowance to buy my own copy of Thriller. I was so small that I could barely see the top of the counter at the record store in the Fairfax Village shopping center up the street from my house. I ran home to put it on the portable turntable I'd been given for Christmas. It spun nonstop for at least a year. The same went with Bad and Dangerous. Even when the music got to a place that didn't completely thrill me, I still had to respect it, just because it was Mike. I wasn't a glove wearer and I never had the jacket but my love for the man still ran deeper than even I knew, hence the fire-laden tears that fell in the face of his memory.

Later, at the little Temple Bar, my manager and I chopped it up on the implications of this thing. My ex-agent bought me a second Dewar's that took me right where I wanted to be as Mike's greatest hits pumped through the speakers. On the way home, dripping with the glaze of the perfect buzz I got a three-piece from the Popeye's drive through after the Bentley waiting in line before us pulled off. I giggled at the idea that the driver might get chicken grease on the seats.

Mike, the organic vessel will soon be returned to the earth, its reimagined alterations and all will soon reduce to bones in a box, like the ones of another persecuted man that we wanted to buy. But his voice, and his movements and the shining light that led us all wherever he wanted to take us will live on forever, as long as we keep pushing play.

The Two Jills

2009-06-24T11:19:00.000-07:00

"So how are you dealing with this June gloom?" one of the teachers at the day care center asks me after I drop off the five year-old with the blue eyes. She's from Albany so she gets my complaint when I say that it's summer and I miss the thunderstorms, and the humid heat and the general electricity that comes with the season back East. After so many sunny days in a row, you expect some kind of a drastic change, but all you get are these strings of mornings where the skies are gray but clear completely by afternoon. Note to self: spending summers elsewhere will become mandatory once we can afford it.

As I'm finally getting caught up on what I missed being in perpetual motion for the last few months, I managed to stumble across the Jamie Foxx clip for "She Got Her Own", which features Ne-Yo and Fabolous. Helmed by Chris Robinson it's a smorgasboard of black female eye candy including the likes of Keyshia Cole, Eve, and my favorite "girlfriend", Jill Marie Jones. I've been missing her since she left the show and haven't had a chance to catch the few flicks she's done since. I'd love to see her in something "real", which for me means not another comedy where she plays a two dimensional hot girl or diva squared. Perhaps I'll make that a project of my own. Having her on set for 12 weeks might make spending another summer in LA worth it.

Later in the same day I got word that my other baby, Jill Scott, has unloaded yet another man, but this time while she's still pregnant. I remember her ex, Little John [Not the one from the East Side Boyz] from my early days covering the Atlanta music game. To snag Jill fresh of a divorce I had to respect his gangster. But now that he's out of the picture beyond child support payments, the question for me becomes "Who's Next?" As I'm still on the low floors beneath her A-list Penthouse, I'm worried that she'll devour another man or three before I get to the top. But then again I am on the man-eater diet these days. So it's just as well.

For a dude that's dead broke I'm an awful lot of deadlines. For the first time in a long time most are on spec, so I'm kind of playing Vegas with my time. Soon I'll need furniture and a TV and a landline, and new spices and kitchen appliances and God knows what else. The thing about starting over is that no matter good you are at climbing, you still have to cover the distance of the new mountain, and it takes awhile. Jill Jones is looking for a spot beyond the small screen. Jill Scott is look for a place in the world where she and her baby can be themselves. In the end were all looking for something. Whether we find it depends on when and how hard we look. End of line.

Crave

2009-06-23T09:50:00.000-07:00

Crave
By Kenji Jasper
(reprinted with permission from the author)

I want to pop a bottle
of freshly-squeezed sunlight
so it can spill
into the valleys
where the shining stars
of your tangerine dreams
got sucked into the black hole
He left behind

I want to farm the bones of
Christmas past and rewrap
gifts given in the name of
false gods who bore real
witness to what you could have
been before the end

I want to trade my left hand
for a French kiss
between your thighs
a thin red line
crossed by sutured hearts
on a collision course
with nothing
to lose

I want to pour out blocks
in the realm of the senses
for building
on your soft places
until your two towers rise
leading you to that craving for
one ring to rule them all.

Copyright Kenji Jasper 2009

Cat's Claws

2009-06-22T13:41:00.000-07:00

There's nothing like listening to a domestic dispute in another language behind the tinted windows of an SUV parked in the driveway right next to where you're trying to get some sleep. It's barely 11pm on a Sunday night. In any reality but this one my fingers would either be busy at the keyboard, thumbing through reading material or keeping a good solid grip on the remote. But when you share a studio space with someone who has to be up at six-ish for a call time it doesn't exactly work that way. It's within this kind of incarceration that one comes to appreciate both solitude and intimacy the most, as right now my life is devoid of either. But better days are ahead.

I finished a pilot package over the weekend, one that I probably feel better about than anything I've written out here before. The crazier thing is that the storyline wouldn't be what it was if I had a series of what felt like dead-end meetings with an executive who proved to know little about what they were doing. I turned an agonizing lack of direction into something I think is real, and am better for it as a part of the experience. It's like Lester Freamon once said "All the pieces matter."

Though my freshman year in LA is less than half over, my mind makes it feel like it's been more like five months. I keep thinking that my sister is turning 17 instead of sixteen in the morning, that I'm 43 instead of 33, on my last legs in a losing battle as opposing to making my first charge down the field towards the endzone. It's been a life inside a box without windows equipped with a cast of characters who have both keep me alive and taken turns rabbit punching me at every opportunity. I've become increasingly open about my general disdain for people as a whole.

This does not mean that I don't love and care for my friends as best as I can, but that repeated disappointments have forced me to rely on self more and more in terms of both support and execution. But it's more like that whole thing at the barbecue. Everyone wants to eat but no one wants to get off their ass and start working the grill. For me working the grill is a way to lose track of Time, who serves as the most vicious CO on my particular cell block.

So now I'm reviewing two hours of a video footage of a woman and her sister who are about to meet their father for the first time. I have to take this story and make it into realistic fiction that doesn't judge when there are judgments to be made all over the place. This is probably why works for hire are an "in case of emergency, break glass" sort of a thing for me. As with all things, I press on. It's the only thing that makes sense. The good thing is that days in the sun are on the calender. I just have to survive the wait for them. End of line.

@ The Eleventh Hour

2009-06-17T17:35:00.000-07:00

Never in my life would I have imagined myself yelling at an elderly Black woman. But as the front fender of her Lincoln town car is less than a foot from my torso, while I'm standing at the center of the designated crosswalk with the 'walk' light on, I had to let her have it.

"I'm sorry, baby. I didn't see you," she says as she speeds down La Brea. I make it to the curb and let out a sigh of relief.

How many times have I come close to death? How many times have I both creatively and figuratively died? I haven't necessarily been keeping count. But there was that time I almost drowned in the wave pool at that water park. And there was that bout of tonsilitis that I thought was just a sore throat that the nurse said could have done me in if anymore time had passed. That guy opened fire on that other guy a foot or two away from me in Norfolk (and then proceeded to lick additional shots in my directions after I was already running down the alley). And there was that time I zipped myself into a clothes hamper and almost suffocated myself at my grandmother's house. Those are just the ones I can recall.

I have seen lesser things take down greater people. Those bigger and faster and smarter than I have fallen before my eyes time and time again over the last three decades. Yet through most of my life I have remained miraculously untouched. I've never had to have surgery or slept in a hospital bed. I've never broken a bone or been assaulted with a weapon. The universe always saved me at the eleventh hour. But that hasn't stopped me from waiting for the bullet I won't be able to dodge.

If a quarter of it is Scorpio paranoia, the rest is equal parts intuition, faith and destiny. And in months like these last few, when I've been floating on a sea of other people's mattresses, odd jobs and underpaying assignments, I'm always ready for this to be it. Now, as I rest in the middle of the war of the roses, and the life behind that made me miserable seems like cake in comparison, I envy every last person who has ever envied me. Why? Because they'll never have to endure this long desert road, one I either chose or it chose me.

But second guessing the universe is like banging your head bloody against a brick wall. All it's left me is dizzy and scarred. Thus, as I center myself before doing what I have to do to get to whatever's on the other side of this, I wonder if the final outcome will be worth the grueling journey it took to get there. I climbed to the top of one mountain only to learn that a more treacherous one was waiting for me. I fell in love over and over only to learn that it was a lie.

Yet another truth of it all is that sometimes it's the mirages in the desert that save your ass. Or at least they give you a reason to keep on going until the next oasis.
I don't think I've ever been this tired in my life. Making this journey was trading in a badge, gun and 20 years of medals to start over in another police academy. But this time I'm training with idiots and fools who have more zeros behind bank balances than I've ever seen on paper. I have to outfox them day after day. Or every predator in town will eat me whole.

Over the last few years I've had these recurring dreams of being trapped in these large towers that represent my life. I move from room to room and see people and problems I know well. People shoot at me but they always miss. My enemies are drowned by the ocean or disappear in plain sight. That's the way it's always been in my real world. The bad guys melted into the background before the climactic fight scene, leaving only myself, he who most often is my worst enemy of all. End of line.

Crash (Part 3 of 3)

2009-06-16T08:03:00.000-07:00

"This is the part where Orlando scores 15 points in three minutes," my boy Robin's neighbor jokes as we watch the final moments of the NBA Finals on TiVo, an hour after the game has actually ended. Relaxation is in the air up in Silverlake and I have no intention of moving. But when Robin's phone rings and he tells me that some friends are having a barbecue at seven in the evening in Echo Park, something tells me that it might be worth tagging along.

Armed with a 12 pack of Pacifico beer, turkey burgers and cheese, we show up at a cozy wood house drowning in foliage. Exile, the famed underground beatmaker is the only person I recognize amongst the mostly white faces. A dude in a pork pie hat strums a guitar as he sings one of his own tunes. Another guy shows up with a girl whose dressed like it's wintertime outside and seems as nervous as clumsy as the geeky chick in a high school movie. The sink is piled high with dishes and stained with organic matter a CSI crew probably couldn't ID. Two Mexican women, one with big pretty eyes and captivating tattoos on both shoulders, float between all the various worlds within the single room. There's only one problem: Nobody's actually barbecuing.

After spending a decade in New York, I'd gotten used to witnessing the bumbling antics of people who think they know how to barbecue: dumping entire bottles of lighter fluid on a single set of coals, painting up meat like five seconds before it goes on the grill, and serious undercooking and overcooking based upon criteria that might only make sense to a five year-old, it got to the point where my friends, even if we were in the homes of strangers, always turned their heads to me as if I had been named grill ambassador. Now, five months into this new place, I was at it again.

With a dirty counter and no cleanser, no Brillo, and a rack of spices about as organized as store inventory the day after Christmas, I rubber turkey burgers with sesame oil seas salt and a touch of soy sauce. I rubbed chicken with teriyaki, black pepper and cumin. I drenched hot sausages and long slabs of carne asada in whatever made sense, and slapped them all of on a grill someone had filled with an entire bag of coles. Needless to say, things cooked quickly.

As I brought in each platter, the two ladies and one of the houseguests, who was also Mexican, began chopping cilantro, onions and tomatoes, and organizing bread and condiments for a cafeteria-style meal. While the white boys listened to vaudeville records on an old phonograph, the folks of color were all about eating. The food appeared and disappeared. It wasn't my best work, but the entire room eventually came alive with praise, full mouths and thumbs up thrown in my direction. As the clock jumped past one it felt strangely good to be out and about at an indecent hour, a welcome change from all of these early bedtimes and assemblies of folks talking about the same thing forty different ways. Driving north to south on Vine, I thought dreamed of days ahead when I might have something to celebrate again, when the Job-like storyline of my life here might finally come to a close. That future, if it is to be, can't get here fast enough. End of line.

Crash (Part 2)

2009-06-15T15:38:00.000-07:00

While I would never consider myself a sports fan, I am a sucker for moments of glory. I can turn on any game in any competition and savor the heroes journey from defeat to victory and vice versa. So when my man Jonas invited me along to a focus group at a female screenwriter's house meant to help out with a football script she was writing , I was worried that I would be exposed as a faker immediately. But as a third generation member of a family that once ate and bled the Redskins, I had plenty of stories to slap onto the pile. Even as I was the guy there who didn't know anybody, I knew enough to blend into the patter. And once the free beer and pizza started to flow it was kind of a cakewalk.

The writer's tiny parakeet flew freely around the room, landing on our shoulders and forearms as it soaked up the energy of the discussion. Male bonding is a severely uncomplicated thing. Whether it's women and sex, violence, sports, or current events, there's something about the all-dude gathering that is definitely uncomplicated, particularly when you're dealing with working-class dudes without airs.

As the tape rolled we told the truth and nothing but the truth. Tom Brady over Eli Manning. T.O. is a team killer. Athletes always acted a fool but 24 hour news and gossip has just made covering it all up an impossibility. I thought of my grandfather, whose cooking and knowledge of all things dude I wish I'd had for a little longer. But at least I have a good memory. I also took home pizza that became the next day's breakfast. And that's the dudest of dude things to do. End of line.

Crash (Part 1)

2009-06-15T15:23:00.000-07:00

1.

Little Tokyo. Friday night. I've spent too much time having to explain to Asians that I'm not one of them. Sure my name comes out of their language, but the features which they seem certain belong to their tribe actually come from my own. So when I showed up uninvited to a weekend-long convention for mixed race artists, I found myself being lectured on great Asian Americans by some guy with too much time, wine and a PDA on his hands. He seemed cool enough. I just think the liquor had taken hold. I was there mainly to see an old friend from New York. Her father is Nigerian and her mother is from the Phillipines. At a point in time we talked late into the night every night, sharing secrets that to this day have never revealed in the daylight of our lives.

"People talk too much here" she said deadpan, a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, a real New Yorker 3000 miles from home. Close to a decade after our first meeting I'm still surprised by the level of honesty we share about life and love. She walked away from the writing racket, got married and never look back. I tried to walk away but never really got there. A random Japanese women walks up to us and asks if we're together. We give emphatic knows but she still clicks off shots like Annie Leibovitz on deadline. Her ride comes and she's off to see Sunset Blvd. I'm off in my wheezing sedan in search of my bed. We both miss our friendship, but in this different season, neither of us has room for it in the same way. End of line.

Buildin' Me A Home

2009-06-11T18:50:00.000-07:00

If I were to go into all the details of the both sordid and yet comical business involving the duplex where I will be living for the forseeable future, you the reader might wonder what drug I must have been on when I allowed myself to be shanghaied into this situation. The characters until recently included a middle-aged man named Ray who my godsister had the misfortune of seeing shirtless while he was shaving with the bathroom door open, Billy C. Williams, an ex-con and college football player with five kids by four different women who claims that older white women wrote him checks for sex, and the reflexologist who claimed to be the building owner when he wasn't. I couldn't have written anything more bizarre. But none of this profits my positive outlook on things and the role the Divine has played in this proceedings. Thus, I will not waste words.

The important thing is that we now have cable and wi-fi in this rather massive residence. The cable who came by was short on his knowledge of the English language but strong in expertise when it came to giving us a solid package and a limitless signal for us to password protect and keep as our own. I made shrimp scampi in the kitchen and thought about the folks faraway whom I would have loved to share it with.
I miss the muggy summers back east that this place frees me of.

Soon I was take a brief excursion away from these lands to work on a project heinous that I would only admit to its existence in a forum where I remain anonymous. This isn't the first time I've gone for the money and it definitely won't be the last. But when I return I will mold my half of this place into a lair that will keep body and spirit in tune with my surroundings: the echo of "La Cucaracha" on the ice cream truck, the bell of the passing Mexican ice cream man, the junior high-aged Crip skateboarders I made note of as I went for a stroll, and the sounds of seediness at the Snooty Fox Inn just up the road. It takes me little time in a place for me to begin to unravel it's story. I can't be sure of what I find here, but I will call it my home. End of line.

The Weight

2009-06-10T10:59:00.000-07:00

When I was on set a few weeks ago, one of the grips happened to notice that I was working on a script while sitting at the craft services table. I've mentioned him here before. He's a middle-aged Italian guy. Tattoos up and down his arms from Osaka, and a breath of knowledge in literature that makes me feel like illiterate. Our initial conversation turned into a sort of free for all about writing scripts and rules to follow to make sure you hit the mark. As we talked I explained that the biggest difference between writing books and writing for the screen is control.

When a studio or production company is financing the collossal undertaking or producing a product that isn't guaranteed to make the investment worthwhile, the entire organization has to sign off on the script, which means that your first draft as writer is pretty much the only one you do by yourself.

As this is the case I'm glad that I will always be a novelist, photographer, cook and a whole bunch of other things that don't have to do with the business. As a matter a fact I'm hoping that my whoredom in this new game will be able to finance a number of smaller but far more artistic projects that I'm hoping to launch in the next year or three including my own small press, a multimedia website and eventually a catering company of all things. As my most recent email from this producer indicates that the project is now "exciting" to him. I guess I did something right [Does a Hail Mary].

It will be different here than it was there, or in the there before that. I will have many lives here, each with their own set of complications. They will overlap and intersect while still maintaining separate but not always equal purposes. I am not alone in this, as we all wear as many hats as our spirits will allow. The weight may be heavy at times. But I was built to handle it. End of line.

Back to the Grill

2009-06-09T13:57:00.000-07:00

There's a table full of beer and wine and a grill covered with chicken, beef, veggies and even tofu. A wood fire rages in the corner while people of varied colors and backgrounds stand around it, chatting idly. A couple who met in this very same place makes out in the driveway. I am in the living room of the hostess, Lia Johnson, listening to a 30-something sista from the Bay berated Gwyneth Paltrow about her recent appearance on Conan O'Brien. This is a barbecue on a Monday night. I have to be in Cali.

Lia produced and starred in "I'm Through With White Girls", a film about two black bohemians who comically fall in love against the backdrop of LA. I came across it on Showtime late one night, and have since learned that it was all the rage at a bunch of festivals in years past. Her twin sister, Phyllis, also an actress (and a face I quickly recognized from the Brooklyn blocks from which I came, was in town and hence, after more than 11 hours traveling from a camping trip in the northern part of the state, they wanted to party. The man who very well might be my manager brought me along as wingman. So now I'm listening to this over-the-top rank about how short Gwyneth's skirt is. But strangely enough, I'm having a good time. It's not the way I'd do a barbecue, but still, there's nowhere else I'd rather be.

The topics of discussion are the same: the lack of gigs, the shrinking of budgets and the death of the music video as a means for a director to make a living (You know it's bad when Beyonce' clips are maxing out at $100,000) but there's something different about this group of faces, some of whom worked on Lia's film and others who are moonlighting their passions while grinding it away wherever they can find cover. Everyone seems to agree on the issues and the needs, but we're all waiting for something to happen, staring at the door and waiting for some being to come through it that might give us solutions to the hemmorhaging mess that is our business.

Despite this, I somehow know that I'm in the right place, as I now know that two of my closest NYC collaborators (and I'm betting on a third) are heading out to the Left Coast behind me. Whether this is Divine providence or strictly a couple of people who knew their Rotten Apple treasure chests were about to run dry remains to be seen. But experience and time make everything clearer.

Taking a timeout in the shadows, the Guy that might be my manager tells me how much he loves my script and the many different marketing angles within it. He has notes (Anybody who reads anything your write out here) but generally he thinks it's doable. This is good news, a ray of sunshine that makes me feel a little warmer about my client meeting about my first draft later in the week. I'm still a little scared. But as an agent once told me, "If you're writing and you're not scared, you're doing something wrong."

End of line.

Kalifornia

2009-06-08T10:08:00.000-07:00

It's 7am on a Saturday when my eyes pop wide open. Unbelievably, I went to bed just four hours before. But my laptop is in a production office 20 minutes away milking free wi-fi access as there will be none of my own for at least a week. It says a lot about my relationship with my laptop that I'll lose sleep in the name of retrieving it as quickly as possible.

Mos Def's "Kalifornia", a lesser known track of his, place in the ride as I cruise north into the morning of the new day. I know the way from memory. Each trip to a destination no longer requires both map book and GPS. I know most of the freeways. And I know why I'm here. If I can survive the next three weeks, which include catering to my godsister's mother for five days, getting ready for a week-long trip out of town for this new gig, getting into the second draft of this script for hire, finishing a spec pilot and this book proposal, permanently moving into the new crib and buying furniture and rebooting my once-regular exercise routine after close to nine months of sloth, then I'll be back to Superman status. But even if I don't it's back to getting things done, which is the way I like it.

I found a cool little Italian bistro close to Marina del Rey called Fioretto. And it was there that I had dinner with my new homie and producer extraordinaire, Karen. Karen, who ventured west over a decade ago, has been around long enough to know a little bit of everybody. So it was more than an honor when she decided to get to know me. As I sat there, eating bouillabaisse and wishing that they weren't out of the ravioli stuffed with shrimp and crabmeat, I had another one of those "I live here" moments, even as living here is just a way and means to be able to live anywhere.

As Karen and I talked about the future of the business, one where movies will go back to being done for sensible budgets and where film crews and productions will sprout up all over due to the tax incentives many states are offering filmmakers in an attempt to boost revenue, a guy like me to find himself on set anywhere from Atlanta to Seychelles in the name of the work I do. That's a beautiful thing for me as writer/director, but for those folks here in LA looking to put together 12 straight months of work each year on crews, it could be a disaster. That tower is crumbling, a necessary sideffect of evolution, and the revolution that I plan on being a part of.

Later on Saturday, I sat at the rear of a panel on TV writing at the Black Hollywood Film Festival, complete with a moderator who told the entire audience to shut-up, a guy with a pilot that had Damon Wayans' son attached (which he couldn't get made), the woman who approached the Q&A mic to plug her own self-published book with a mispelling in the title, and a number of testifying "managers" who I wouldn't trust to oversee their own checkbooks, I kept thinking of that scene in The Usual Suspects where Kevin Pollak's Todd Hockney asks the interrogating cops "You guy must have a team of monkeys working on this one?" I try not to believe in the rules of the game or the rambling of fools. Instead I believe in myself, what I'm capable of and my own destiny. If I don't do it for me then nobody else is going to do it for me. End of line.

The Time

2009-06-04T14:03:00.000-07:00

I thought that I'd have the verdict back from this producer about the script I did for him around today. But of course I get an email from him asking for another week so that he can read it again and "digest" it. On the surface this might not seem like a bad thing, but to a semi-paranoid writer whose been living the life of Job for three years, it's another seven days that I have to worry about whether or not I managed to wow one person out here with the work I do, a moment I've been waiting for (in an official sense) for most of the decade. I think I've learned a lot of things, but you never can tell. I'm a little shook on this one, but at least my next job won't be working craft services.

I got an offer for a gig. And the money's right enough. If things all fall into place The Grand Lodge might be up and running again in a month's time. Until then it's a matter of getting the ship into dock so I can board it, which will include (in no specific order) a return to my hometown to gather the things I left in my Mama's dining room and to speak to teen girls in an arts empowerment summer program, the buying of furniture and the materials for a proper kitchen, a general determination on where I'll be laying my head and at least one celebratory night of debauchery in the given city of my choice (or perhaps more than one).

Time is such a fickle bastard. Some days she's working with you to get more done than lesser men have throught possible. Other times she's like a cracked hourglass, destined to always run out too quickly. I have had too much in the hours I dreamt of filling writing someone's script. But there wasn't enough when I found myself nomadically relocating from one temporary home to the next. So many seem to think that this will only strengthen the intensity of my renown and success.

There are so many things that I've been forced to learn on that road between the "here" behind me and the "there" coming up ahead. I haven't exactly blown up the Death Star as of yet, but if the verdicts come in favorably this town will at least be worthy of me copping a pair of its license plates for it ;)

But before then I must face off with bank managers, liars and hustlers, a manager to be, a producer heading from east to west, a social calendar that's getting a little respectable and the menu for my coming soon housewarming shindig that will be designed to get my block hot faster than Santa Ana winds. With that I have a spec to write and a proposal to revise and dreams to be dreamed about moving on up to the West Side. End of line.

Love/Hangover

2009-06-03T10:02:00.000-07:00

It's Saturday afternoon and the last day of principal photography on the flick. The remaining cast and crew are shooting green screen stuff in the parking lot while I am watching eps of Fringe and disassembling and wiping down what was once craft services, the place where I spent 13 days shopping, filling bowls and trays and fielding complaints from every department to the higher ups. I got yelled at and trapped in the crossfire between various parties, all for a sum that I've made in an hour before, though I'm not exactly complaining.

There are lessons to be learned wherever you go. And within the hustle and bustle of this film, I made more than a few friends and potential collaborators: a sound man who had to have been one of my main boys in a former life, a trio of makeup artists with different styles and personalities that I would love to put to work with actors playing my characters, and a few good production assistants who have their eyes set on the same heaven I hope to enter someday soon. Not to mention, a new homeboy from Harlem who's hipping me to the game of the business I've stepped into. There is potential. There is promise. There is a blindingly bright future for me. I just needed the proper shades to see it.

So as the catering truck served us shrimp and steak for our last meal, and the numbers and business cards were passed like bread and loaves through the crowd, I not only realized that it wasn't that bad, but also that I would miss these people. Within the insanity of moviemaking (as crew jobs are becoming harder to find in LA but easier in other towns) I somehow manage to belong. The fact that I can sit with a sound guy or a DP or a grip and know much of their lingo and what they need to properly execute their jobs is a testament to an education that began in childhood, one that was preparing me for a career that's yet to come.

I slept for 11 hours from Saturday to Sunday. Then I spent the next 48 finishing up my script (which I handed in on time I might add). Now I am back to the blog and my list of things to get done if I'm going to make it here. Chris Wallace said it best. It's an everyday struggle. But I think it was one I was made for. End of line.

No Meals and the Hour of Chaos

2009-05-28T11:08:00.000-07:00

There's a beautiful bridge just beyond the window where I'm sitting that overlooks the LA River, if you want to call it a river that is. Growing up with many rivers I look at it as an elongated sewage pipe. But I hear there are fish in there that one some guys try to catch. You never know what lies beneath.

There are three days left on this crew job. The Israeli owner of the studios we're using (complete with wide open shirt and the gaudy gold chain) wants more money because he doesn't like the way the art department is moving sets around. There is apparently no petty cash (or a check for that matter) for me to buy food. My direct supervisor barely speaks to me when I'm addressing problems that affect me to do my job. I broke the sound barrier last night trying to deliver ten pizzas to the crew before they were wrapped for the day in the name of union requirements and watched it reduced to a pile of boxes in less than five minutes (literally). Now I know what it's like to have kids.

But this is the job. And so many of the folks doing other things have started out with it. I made my page quota yesterday, and hope to do the same by the end of today. When I'm done with this deal I'm jacking the cutting board, bread knife, coffeemaker, cooler and anything else I can snag for the kitchen in the new abode. Plus I'm snagging the Tupperware. God, I'm starting to feel like a suburban housewife.

The highlight of my morning was a volley of texts with my little sister, who is most likely sitting in a classroom somewhere, either bored or waiting for something to happen. She reminds me of myself in many ways. But her spirit is brighter, more tranquil, not as much of a hothead as I tend to be. I miss both of my sisters more than I can express, as they are a major part of the reason that I made this jump.

As I sit here amongst the half-killed two bottles of soda and the scant bottles of water floating in a chest of ice that's been melting overnight, I know the natives are going to be restless until I make a shopping run. But instead of dwelling on that I'm remembering that I sparked up a convo with the director at lunch yesterday that let him know that we were on the same page, and chopped it up with the music supervisor in the same manner. I'm trying to think of this all as just another story that I can control the ending for, even it's not. It helps to reinforce my hidden belief that this will all be worth it. Time to make the coffee and slice the bagels. End of line.

Divine Intervention

2009-05-27T11:35:00.001-07:00

I've never been a fan of profiting from the suffering of others, but my saving grace came in the form of a petty cash shortage. No petty cash means that I can't buy food, which means that people go hungry. But it also means that I get to sit and wait. So I've been waiting for a good five hours now after making every last sandwich and putting out all the I had before the trough. The natives are restless. We're out of ice and water and my PBJ and turkey sandwiches are down to nothing, along with the licorice. All that's left is a bowl full of bagels without any butter or cream cheese to go with them. Give it another hour and that'll be dry as a bone as well.

But this lull in supplies has given me some much needed rest. After I got a call before six (when my alarm was set for seven) I learned that I had to pick up a new crew member who was without a car, get the last of my stuff out of my boy's crib, wipe it down, load my car, take everything to the new residence, get the dude and then get to set before call time. I'm not a morning person. I'm not a person who likes abrupt changes in plans when it comes to the job. And when it all came together, compounded by the effect of the 12-hour a day gauntlet I've been running for the last week and some change, I felt like I was on the verge of a meltdown.

12 hours later I am thinking about Fred Williamson and how cool he was when we spoke briefly at breakfast, think about the hilarity of Eddie Griffin doing a sketch as Black Jesus addressing the disciples at The Last Supper. I listened intently while he and Fred chopped it up on the other side of the room about the state of Black film and the burden that Will Smith has to bear by being a superstar (i.e. he can't smoke weed or go to the strip club). The personalized license plates on Fred's Hummer read "Da Hammer". And he thinks that Tyler Perry has set Black people back 25 years.

After we wrapped early our director turned up with a bottle of Hennessy in one hand while the other searched for cups on my table for his various homies, while I banged out a good seven pages of my script and got myself back on schedule. I have connected with the other writers on the crew. We talk about books and movies and our generally smartass views on life. There are also dancer/actresses, photographers, a dude with terrible taste in shirts, men with elaborate tattoos they got in places like Osaka and Amsterdam, a 22 yearold white girl who gets teased because she has a booty that puts most others to shame, and the grips who do me little favors because I feed them well .

We all find smiles in the comraderie of putting this thing together, even if most of us only see fragments of what will be the final product. It is those little moments, when the madness has retreated, that I hold most dear, as they remind me of my early days in the old neighborhood.

I have seven days to make deadline, which means that I'd like to be done in four so that I can have time to buff it to a shine. Hopefully it will grant me enough dough for a reprieve from my semi-nomadic existence, or at least open one of the many doors that lead me to the next stage of my grand plan. I just have to keep opening and closing until I'm passing through semi-permeable portal that leads to glory. End of line.

Houses

2009-05-25T20:58:00.000-07:00

My first apartment in Brooklyn was a studio with a wall in it that they called a one-bedroom. I spent three-quarters of the two years I lived there in my boxer shorts because the building furnace kept the room temperature around 80 degrees in the dead of winter. The rest of the time I was defending my floor space from rodent and dealing with complaints about my music from the gay brother across the hall who made dolls and had been living in the tiny building for more than a decade.

When I got the advance for my second book, I decided to upgrade. I hired actual movers for the first time in my life and beamed with pride as I took residence on the top floor of a brownstone overlooking a street that only got loud in the summertime. New hardwood floors. High ceilings. Brand new windows. I was the envy of many of my friends. My next interim residence will be taking over half of the third of a house in Mid-City while I await further instructions from the gods above. I'm not ecstatic about it. But with a little imagination, use of the kitchen whenever I choose and a call to the local cable/internet service provider, it's at least a step in the right direction. And it's better than my first place in NYC (though not by much). But I have keys and a bill in my name so it's now my next home away from home.

On the way to drop off my things I came to a stoplight at La Brea and Highland where panhandlers perch. Maybe it was the era of hip hop I was playing, but when I passed him by on the donation tip he pulled up his sleeve and pointed to the New York Yankees tattoo on his forearm. His ball cap was filthy. His hair was matted, but that insignia needled into his skin was so clean that it could have been done the day before.

Part of me worries that that will be me: eyes, ear and throat choking as we drown in the black waters of this dead sea from which I never return. Part of me, not unlike most people in this town, goes to bed dreaming that tomorrow will be the day that we somehow make it. I'm just another name and number here, a disc with its history wiped by the electromagnetism of Tinseltown.

With each day more people come to the set, which means the amount it took most of the day for me to get onto the craft services table is now consumed in half the time. And we're shooting at a production table so the crew makes more and more visits. I've been told that it's normally a two to three person job. But I'm the only person in the budget. So once again, I have to make something from nothing when I would have rather stayed where I was. All the jobs I love end quickly. The ones that stay around pick at my liver daily, knowing that it will grow back by morning so that they can pick at it again.

I came to New York with big dreams and tiny expectations and got things quickly. I came here thinking that I walking around dripping with kerosene, only in need of a spark to set the world on fire. Instead I'm slipping deeper into the darkness, hoping that there's a bottom...somewhere. End of line.

The 25th Hour

2009-05-22T19:49:00.001-07:00

On the other side of the weekend I will celebrate having lived in my homeboy's basement for four months. That's two and a half months longer than I planned on. My tenure as resident houseguest resulted in me taking on certain duties to earn my keep. The most important of these has been driving his daughter and son to school each morning. So for most of the last four months I've been up seven to chauffeur an eight and five year-old to school in my beat-up car.

I became a "rock star" to the other kids there who seem to view me as a cross between a cool older brother and some kind of "badasss" as I've been told. My car is equipped with car seats and is usually litered with toys and remnants from the day's lunches. Hannah Montana and the Hairspray soundtrack are the only things in the Ipod for two hours a day, four days a week. I now know three different routes from The Valley to Culver City, when I once only knew half of one. I met some great people as result of the experience. But it's time to move on.

Sometime before the end of June I'll have a place of my own again for the first time in nine months. Before that I'd lived alone for eleven years. Being without address and full privacy and a space to do me without interruption has been a chore to say the least. But I also know now that it's not the end of the world either. In a perfect world every last posession I either own or have had given to me will be under my own roof, which means that I'll be an official LA resident, which means that I'll have to call this place home.

It hasn't sunk in yet, as this basement guest unit is the place where I've normally stayed for visits in the past. But once I have neighbors and bills and a schedule of appointments, I'll have to surrender to my present, as opposed to holding onto my past. The new will replace all that I left at the curb outside of my old home in Bed-Stuy. I gave most of my books to the local library and a good chunk of my CDs to the streets. I sold and got rid of most of all the furniture that I'd acquired over seven years, and even left behind most of my kitchen. And I did it all in five days. It only took five days for me to extract myself from the city I thought I'd never leave. It shows you the impermance of all things and the power of the universe.

I will miss the kids dearly, but I won't miss the grind of grabbing them every day. I will miss the morning air here in the hills, but not the kitchen that I lose access to at 9 at night. I won't miss the guy up the street who watches me walk into the house when I park on the street at night, nor the sounds of meditations tapes playing through the ceiling whenever the house is emptied.

But as I am a guest I appreciate it all was experience. Living a rated-PG existence for so long has made me pine for heavy doses of R and XXX. But it's also helped me to see my own future, one where the outside of me and mine will disappear for as long as we, as a family can keep it at bay. I am more ready for colds and injuries and talks about grown-up stuff , sex before they wake up and all the other gifts and curses that come with being husband, father and provider. That's why I'm here starting all over. That's why this matters. It's all for them, those who have yet to be but will be, just a little further down this life as yellow brick road. End of line.

The Ballad of Fallen Angels

2009-05-20T23:59:00.001-07:00

For the past six days I have worked 12-hour shifts as the craft services guy on a low-budget indie film about Black Hollywood. The work is grueling as it is my job to continually feed 40-70 actors, crew members and support staff in between their two required meals, which are provided by caterer. I am also designated as the point man for keeping water, ice and coffee on set. And I manage the first aid kit. The funny thing is that these responsibilities aren't difficult from me. My problem is dealing with people.

There's something very draining about being a prisoner to the whims of names and faces who always want something from you. If it's not on the table and enough people ask for it, then you have to get it, which means hopping in the car and making yet another run to the local supermarket, where you've become a semi-celebrity due to your multiple daily trips there. The things they're so-so on instantly become in high demand. Today I found myself making three loaves worth of half-PBJ sandwiches because the five fat guys just love to hang around my station and empty the trays before I get a chance to fill them. But all of this is just the precursor to a realization.

As the day comes to an end, I watch young actresses parade past me in skin-tight dresses, as they are meant to portray whores in a sketch parodying "Hustle and Flow". Their bodies are perfect by the general standards. The gym does them well. The heels don't hurt either. The weave action is heavy and expensive, so much so that it's distracting. As they parade before me I realize that I, like the other men on the crew, should be breaking my neck to look at them. But I don't. When I look into their eyes there doesn't seem to be anyone there.

They come to my table from time to time, and we speak politely enough. Their outfits advertise instead of seduce. The subjects and anecdotes in their conversations almost seem rehearsed. They are horses meant to be mounted by the Hollywood machine, fodder for men who are grown fat feeding off of blood of others. For me, this state of being is more pronounced than their pretty public faces or bangin' bodies. In their lifetimes, hundreds if not thousands of men will think of them when trapped alone between their own sheets. But they just don't do it for me, at least not now.

There are voices that often call out to me from eastern lands. Their timbres and intentions vary. Their world, the one I left behind, is stunningly more real than this frozen paradise. I am recalling the smells of perfume and oil and sweat, pheromones and the warm tones of her voice in the darkest rooms in my fantasyland. I miss real women. I miss real love. End of line.

Soldier

2009-05-15T04:03:00.000-07:00

If it's said that we come into this world with everything we need, then there's something about having an overactive brain that's going to save my ass one of these days. Every since I was small I would find that the dark of night was the time when I discovered certain truths. Both epiphanies and mini-breakdowns came to there, as they were more free to roam without the hustle and bustle of whichever daily schedule I was slave to at the time.

So on a morning like this one, one before my first night as the craft services guy on a film set [I've since skimmed the script and have opted, in the name of my own self-esteem, to say nothing about the project this job is a part of], I am listening to an array of birds chat it up at 4 in the morning instead of getting a good night's sleep.

It ain't the first time and it won't be the last. It's yet another sideffect of who I am, another piece of my puzzle that I've become all the more comfy with. At least when I do awake my blog for the day will already be taken care of ;)

This morning I think I found the answer to a question that's been plaguing me for almost a year to the day. Strange things have been afoot in the subterranean world of which I am occasionally granted glimpses. What lies beneath my insomnia is the fact that an ever-growing part of me knows that my landing phase of this particular mission is almost complete. Next up: air and ground assault. As a non-white soldier relying on guerilla tactics and intuition as opposed to the massive cannons of some figurative armada, I have to make it my business to collect heads, while managed to keep my own attached and functioning.

After viewing the LOST season finale last night, I asked myself the question that Jack Shepard, (played by Matthew Fox) one of the show's protagonists, answered for himself. Would I run the risk of destroying an entire island and the people on it in the name of getting another shot at the things I loved most? My unequivocal answer is yes. Will that answer change if my statistically improbable plan fails? Possibly. But I don't think that's a bridge I'm ever going to come to. In a way, I think the hardest part is over.

As a yawn leaves my mouth, I find solace in the fact that there has never been a jam I haven't managed to wiggle myself out of, unless I needed to lose. As much as I wanted to charge into this line of work with guns blazing some eight years ago, when my first book got optioned, I know now that I was in no shape to take up shield and sword against the fire-breathing beast of the entertainment biz. I was too idealistic, a little too arrogant, and to quote my colleague and occasional NYC drinking buddy, author Nick Tosches, I "had yet to be dealt my humbling blows."

But now, as I'm finding the first semblances of feeling in my limbs underneath the California sun, I understand fully what I have to do to get back to a simple kind of life in Kansas. I, in my own way, have to blow up a whole island and rifle through it's pieces to find a blackened heart in need of being made whole again. If this decade was a neo-80s, then the next one will a neo-90s. The 90s gave birth to many of the films that pushed me down this path. Now I'm going to try and make the same kind of flicks so that young punk, who is the very reflection of who I once was, can begin to believe in the possibility of a better creative tomorrow. That's what you might call a neverrending cycle, both gift and curse that comes with catching and carrying the eternal flame from '93 to infinity. End of line.

Lulu

2009-05-14T09:33:00.000-07:00

It's been almost 14 years since my second dog, Joe, passed away on the rug at the foot of my bed. He was 12 years and I was 20. He had been with my family since I was eight. When I made the bi-weekly journey from one parent's house to the other he went with me. So we both had two different places to play, two different worlds to take in.

Next to my father's old house in Temple Hills was Benjamin Stoddert Middle School, which had a huge field behind it where we let him run free twice a day. Joe used to slide under the gap in the fence that separated the school from the bordering woods. He come back clutching one of the box turtles that lived by the creek back there and bring them out to me or my father, giving in to his natural instincts as hunter and retriever. He didn't know what to do with them once he had them [We always put the turtles back as close to their natural habitat as possible]. He was just following his instincts. His death, due to complications from cancer, was a rough one for me. I haven't owned a dog since.

But in the three months that I've been here at this ranch, my biggest supporter has been Lulu, my boy and his family's two year-old poodle, with whom I've fallen in love with in a way that I never would have expected. Like most good dogs, she is loyal, protective, energetic and an attention hound in the most beautiful kind of way.

At my boy's suggestion I brought her along to drop his son off at school and was immediately transported back to the first day that we got Joe from the DC Animal Rescue league. His whole family had been there, a clan of black dogs with white spots on their chest: mother, sister and a brother. But he was the one that stood out for me. He kept his head in the wind the whole way home. He saved me from getting jumped once, growled consistently at friends of mine who eventually sold me out and was more like a brother to me than a pet.

As I've crossed over into a new phase in my life, I can't the surprisingly ample pain I still feel about losing my dog, keep me from acquiring a new companion. Once I get settled I think I'm going to get myself a new hound, and strangely enough possibly an aquatic turtle too. Will two pets take work? Sure. But as I've seen with Lulu I'm good at taking care of what I care about. In a city of mostly disloyal souls it might be good to come home to a being that's always happy to see me, regardless of my mood or actions. It will also make sure that I walk a good distance each day in a city where people drive from their house to the corner. And there's some to be said for hearing the jingling of metal tags on a collar as I come through the door, or a casual barking warning me of the outside world while I sleep. It's something I've quietly missed for a long time. Now I'm finally going to do something about it. End of line.

Crew

2009-05-13T12:10:00.000-07:00

My father tried to warn me at a very early age about the impermanence of most friendships.
"You'll be lucky if you have one friend who stays with you your whole life," he's said to me on numerous occasions, usually after fall-outs and breakups that I didn't understand...at the time. But I think I do now.

In my mind I imagined my arrival here as a chance to put the old band back together, my college crew of co-hort artists who helped me to give birth to a better version of myself, one who didn't stutter as much, one who didn't rush in like fool riding on his emotions while his brain was switched off in the name of idealism and attraction and God knows what else.
There were eight of us then, all bound together by the name we gave ourselves, the friends and contacts we'd scraped together that alotted us access into almost anything despite our working-class upbringings. Whether it was sneaking into music conventions or hosting dinner parties, we were more in synch than Justin and JC. But nothing last forever.

I always saw myself as the youngest and least confident. But I was the guy who never stopped practicing, who prided himself on writing at least a poem a week, and who annoyed the hell out of his college sweetheart because he never went to bed when she did. When the keyboard or notebook called me I was there. "That's your first love," she said once. "Not me." The funny thing is that it was the other way around.

I've always been looking for something to supersede this, something bigger and better and more important for me to wrap my head around: a family, a lover, some religious call arms. But it seemed as if the more I held on tightly to those things, the quicker they turned to powder between my palms.

I just wanted to be the homeboy for my musician and filmmaker friends. I wanted to write breaking profiles and occasional end up as part of entourage on some music video set. My director friend would have me write the occasional script for him. I would pen the biographies for my platinum-selling compatriots. But somehow, in spite of myself and my often low-key plans, it was I who ended up in the spotlight first.

I was the sihouette of the cowboy on his horse against the new horizon, waiting for those other six shadows to join me. But it didn't really happen that way. It was more like we all went into the crowd at Times Square on New Year's Eve and gradually drifted away. It was slow and quiet and barely noticeable because we all knew the same people. But it was happening. And I couldn't stop it. It wasn't my place to stop it. The final blows seemed to be delivered when I decided to head to points west. It always almost as if my coming here bridged the geographic gap that had someone managed to keep us together for the sake of appearances.

I was a witness to the disintergration of some of my father's friendships. Though I didn't always know the specifics I knew that at one point everybody seemed to come by the house and then there were only a few. I ran into one or two on the street and it almost seemed as if it was easier for them to avoid me than it was to say 'hello'. Maybe it's that pride thing again, or maybe I was a passive reminder of poor choices now transformed into water under the bridge. What I saw as Wu-Tang's "Triumph" was more like The Five Heartbeats, without the nice warm ending.

With each day comes new news about the demise of the Old World from which I came. So many of the men and women who keep their boots just above my head on the other side of the glass ceiling are seeing their reign coming to an end. My place there was never meant to be permanent. Nothing is.

I stopped running from my destiny when I gave most of what I owned back to Brooklyn. This will never be my city, but when I'm done there will be at least be one street here, somewhere, that carries my name. I know now that I'm at least that good, even if I don't want to be ;)
End of line.

Land of Confusion

2009-05-12T08:30:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a job working craft services on an indie film. I'm not particularly excited about this as I'll need to show up for work around 5am most of the time and spend 12 hour shifts loading and unloading snacks, water and other food item on and off of the set in my raggedy-ass car. Not only is it not glamorous. It's going to be a pain in the ass. But I could use the money, as the draft of the script I'm working on won't be ready until the end of the month and even after that it will take another few weeks for me to see my next check. Hence, I'm in it to win it.

It's not like I feel like I'm above the work. As a matter working on sets has actually been fun when I've done it in the past, but I deeply miss the days of the occasional meal in a nice bistro with a bottle of wine, the purchase of a DVD or a pair of shoes without sweating bullets and the overall security I had in knowing that I would at least be able to pay my bills each month. My biggest fear is that I'll never get back there again, that I'll be stuck in this neverland of poverty until I'm my father's age. But like all of the dark moments in my past this will come and go eventually, despite the fact that there are so many idiots and privileged entitled punks standing ahead of me in the ticket line for the promised land.

The biggest different between LA and NYC is how it's power players deal with conflict and interactions. Here the rule is either to dick ride when someone has something you want and keep quiet when they gave you something you didn't like. It's this super passive aggressive, leave-the-body-where-it-is-just-in-case-it-gets-up-and-makes-100-million-for-someone-and-we may-need-it-for-our-own-glory-down-the-line. In NY people never had a problem telling me 'no', even though the gatekeepers I know in publishing seem to find it much easier to not answer queries than to even send you a rejection notice. So out here you can only figure out where you stand by reading the signs.

I was talking to a fellow colleague in the business last night, who reminded me that despite all the hurdles I have and will continue to face I have to know that it's not personal. Even more so, the truth about this world is that it's not even about writing. It's all Jedi mind tricks and Alexis Carrington power plays. When expressing my semi-dread about my temp as water boy my friend dismissed it rather simply. "Men have too much pride."

I've always been independent. I always wanted to be able to do it myself. When I did pair up others in the name of partnerships I almost always ended up doing most of the work or found that they had an inability to do theirs. Hence, I walk the long winding road alone. I guess I have to push certain things far out of my mind: the comped hotel suites, the press tours, the emails and letters I still get about my work from people far and wide. I have to table all the times I introduced myself and the person recognized the name instantly, because none of that shit matters out here. Here and now I'm just the guy working craft services and living in someone else's basement. But I'll be out of here soon hook or crook and the job is a means to an end. Maybe I do have too much pride, but in my darker moments it often feels like it's the only thing I have left. End of line.

Confessions on a Dance Floor

2009-05-11T11:26:00.001-07:00

Perhaps I saw too much too soon in the city from whence I came. My 20s were an almost nightly exercise in the flashing lights, open bars and idle chatter that were staples in my social set. Leave the house for dinner at seven and come home at three in the morning either drunk off ass or desperate for sleep. I rubbed shoulders with all kinds of people within the magnetic field of music.
I fell in and out of love with her seven times in that menagerie made of bulletproof glass. Here I generally stay inside.

I found myself at the spot on Seward because my godsister has this Piscean need to be out and about. And since she's crewless here in Hell-A, I don't like the idea of her going out alone. So I as I stood there on the tiny floor, leaning against a post, armed with nothing but club soda and lime as my eyes cut from one feminine form to the next: the fair skinned sister sista checking out her own ass in the mirror on the wall, the six-foot tall amazon in the three-inch heels and waist-high dress that accentuates her near perfect ass, the men holding onto their women in hopes that greater players might not notice their prizes. House music all night long. For me it's just an ok party on an ok night. But here, this not so packed room is the biggest game in town for people who look like me, a place where sistas and brothers come to be with their own and groove to sounds they won't hear in any other club in the city. From what I'm told, this is as good as it gets.

People don't believe me but I'm naturally shy. I dance once or twice a night and it's usually with someone I know, or someone I'm determined to get to know. Most of the time I just read the stories off of people's faces, my cap pulled low and brain abuzz with either thoughts or intoxicants (occasionally both). Once upon I time I came up behind someone I barely knew on the dance floor and grooved with her all might, our hips locked in an ebb and flow that was eventually sealed with a kiss. But that was a whole other lifetime ago, a life where I thought I was going to become a something else that was never meant to be. Here, after 15 minutes I just want to go home. It's 12:15 and in LA last call came come as early as one. I'm not drinking much these days anyway, but that's probably because I have yet to find suitable drinking partners. Soon come I imagine, along with everything else.

My godsister meets a guy and I take my cue to get the hell out of there. It's quiet outside. A couple makes out against the wall. I can smell the joint someone has sparked in the vicinity. It reminds me of old times on Parkside Avenue and the brownies I made that had me wandering LES aimlessly one warm summer night. It's all a planet shrinking as I travel toward the Sun at full thrust, knowing that unlike Icarus, my wings were made for this journey. End of line.

For Whom The Bell Tolls

2009-05-09T10:58:00.000-07:00

I've come to the liberating realization of how wrong the human concept of time is. The seconds, minutes and hours we use to measure experience are a way for us to gauge how much life we have before and behind us, though the People Across The Hall look at it completely differently. Over there, past, present and future are interwoven so tightly that they can be indiscernible. And that's a good thing.

Flipping through Facebook last night I learned that my very first lover finally tied the knot with her fiancee' of a good two or three years. I've met the guy numerous times and I personally think it's a marriage made in heaven. As far as I'm concerned he is the perfect dude for her. I don't have any jealousy or resentment, as our romantic relationship ended long ago. I'm surprisingly happy about it. But I'm also remembering the last time I saw her, some nine months ago on a block on Soho. We walked together for a few minutes, the both of us seeming to stretch out what could have just been a quick nod at the corner.

For her, I would imagine that spending any time with lovers from long ago while on the road to nuptials had to result in some sort of comparison or juxtaposition. But after all this time I'm sure that any memories she has of the two of us are vague and blurry by now, browned photographs in Tupperware in a room somewhere at the back of her brain.

I was explaining to someone just last night that I've been single long enough to be completely comfortable with it. To be honest it's probably the main reason I ended up on a different coast and starting over again. There are now close to three thousand miles between myself and every woman I've ever fallen in love with. Had I stayed with any one of them, particularly those serious exes from my past, I would have never made it here or taken this shot. I have no doubt that tying the knot with any of them would have resulted in me changing my career, or at least marginalizing my creative life in the name of financing whatever domestic dreams the partnership held dear.

Right after I saw her the last time it occurred to me that the reasons for our initial split, which I won't go in, were beyond our control. Something walking with each of us caught fire and burned our house to ash before we ever moved in. It happens more times than not, and I'm not sentimental about it. But I guess that now as it's more off than table that it's ever been before, I wonder if a change in timing might have changed something else. But I'm quick to remind myself that what is meant to be is what is. All else are needles that missed the vein.

While I look forward to the day when I feel safe enough with someone to share a house and bank account, I'm pretty glad that it's not right now. Though I often have to endure the Inquisition from friends and relatives who want to know when I'll have my own spawn and Old Lady, everyone who knows me knows that I won't be good for anyone until I chase my currently quarry down and properly slay it.

I don't know if I could have made the same sacrifices if someone else's well-being was involved, much less a child's. I am Russell Crowe's Maximus in Gladiator, on the front lines of war awaiting the day that I can go home to play in fields of dreams, stalks of love and life swaying in tomorrow's breeze. But right now I have to get through the day. End of Line.

Last Soul Standing

2009-05-08T11:41:00.000-07:00

If there was an actor I idolized in my youth it was Michael J. Fox. Whether he was playing the sarcastic and ambitious eldest, Alex P. Keaton on Family Ties, Marty Mcfly in the Back to the Future series, Brantley Foster in the Secret of my Success or Jamie Conway in the film version of Bright Lights, Big City, Fox was always a master of comedic acting and the classic cinematic underdog. As dude was sitting on more money than God, I didn't take his being diagnosed with Parkinson's all that seriously, even when I saw him in interviews, or during his latest run as a guest star on Rescue Me.

Last night ABC ran a special that Fox put together about his life Parkinson's and the nature of optimistic people in the world. It was one of the shows that you could tell only got greenlit because a formerly A-list guy was at the center, but it was cool seeing my childhood hero still looking youthful in middle age and still being determined to live life on his own terms. It was a good precursor to Star Trek night, which finished at close to 3am. These days I'm driven by any story I can get my hands on about people doing the impossible, especially during the times when I feel like I'm behind the eightball, envying the bulk of my friends because they're too smart to ever consider taking the living gamble that is my life as a scribe.

In a recent conversation with my friend MTM, who I've known for a long time, it was suggested that these are the only situations in which I've thrived for the last 20 years, that I specialize in doing the impossible and getting results. I thought these were admirable qualities worthy of respect, but out here, in no time at all I've seen that jealously, envy and insecurity are the Holy Trinity everyone worships out here, even for people who have known me far longer than they have known this town. Through no fault of my own, I think the assumption in the minds of some was that I was going to somehow show up and set the town on fire, reminding them of what they either can't or won't do in their hot pursuit of their own goals.

There's a part of me that would do anything to go back to the years before things fell apart. But I'm sure that if I went back in time the same issues would be there. I was probably just as uneasy then. even if the circumstances were different. I'm pretty sure that the main reason I still believe in the job is that what I write is one of the few things in this world that I have control over, at least in draft one that is.

Long ago a woman told me that I pretended to be a pessimist because deep down I was the biggest optimist she knew. That was one of the few things she got right about me. Maybe it's the only thing I should remember. But I'm a Scorpio. We're not living unless we have grudges to bear. End of line.

Building

2009-05-07T06:52:00.000-07:00

I was a little worried when I first heard that J.J. Abrams was helming a reboot for the Star Trek franchise. Sure I had watched the first two seasons of Alias and was devoted to Lost [and later Fringe]. But Abrams work has always been derivative, meaning that it's always seemed to come from that Tarantino "my movies are a collage of all the flicks I like" syndrome. I was imagining a group oif stiff young punk actors who couldn't deliver the lines like Patrick Stewart and TNG crew. And there wouldn't be the campyness of the Shatner/Nimoy version. But after a series of solid trailers my fears have melted away. All that remains is the anticipation I'll suffer through between now and midnight when I check it out on opening night, just a few hours after I check out the Toback Tyson thing.

It's funny that this time ten years ago the crew and I had made big plans to catch the premiere of Episode I: The Phantom Menace at the Ziegfield in Times Square. All the Star Wars freaks were out that night completely with costumes, lightsabers and an enthusiasm unlike anything I'd seen since that late night showing of Die Hard during it's opening weekend. I was barely 13 when Fox delivered John McClaine to the world. We were so hype during the last 30 minutes of the movie that we were giving high-fives to complete strangers. I caught T2 with my homegirl Joy after a 4th of July picnic. I saw the Dark Knight returns in a packed theater in Park Slope, Brooklyn at ten in the morning on the solo. As there less than 17 hours between myself and the only film I really care about this summer (though I'm hoping that Benny Boom does some cool things with Next Day Air) I'm hoping I get back to the crib at like three tomorrow morning trembling with excitement. But like a young girl whose heart's been too many times before, Abrams is going to really have to put it down to get my allegiance.

In the meantime there is the script to hack away at, and the pilot I'm trying to sell, and the dreams of a crib in a neighborhood with yards, trees and a Whole Foods close by, things I didn't have in Brooklyn, though there's now a Trader Joe's closer to the old hood, the one I will return to someday adorned with scars and stitches from the war I'm fighting on this side of things, a covert op whose repercussions will be felt by more than just a few, like the impact from a photon torpedo when the shields are down. I'm heading toward my destiny at Warp 5. And my weapons aren't set to stun. End of line.

Robin

2009-05-06T08:47:00.000-07:00

I was 11 years old the first time I met Robin Givens. I was an event at the Smithsonian's Museum of American History, serving as a co-host for a kids TV show in the city. The museum was dark and empty outside of the corridor where the party was being held. Even then I found a kind of comfort in the shadows while everyone else seemed better off in the light. Apparently she felt the same way, or maybe she was just bored.

This was right after Head of the Class had begun to hit. I'd seen the show and was a fan, but I played it like she was just some girl. I foolishly thought that I had a shot as we studied the big steel pendulum at the center of the museum. We only talked for a few minutes and we didn't even exchange names. She was smart, articulate, pretty and a daughter without a father in her life. Knowing what I've read about her background it wouldn't surprise me if Mike Tyson was a decision about security. I think she'd learned how to "manage" men by watching her mother, who did what she had to do to take care of her family. Life ensued. What happened happened. She's made herself memorable on screens large and small ever since.

I somehow forgot about that meeting when Boomerang hit. My attraction to her character , Jacqueline Broyer wasn't completely physical. Her beauty was there but it was more about the fact that she wasn't impressed with the Marcus Graham playbook, that she had her own agenda and stuck to it all the way through until the end. Was she playing the role or was the role made for her? Either way she's been etched in the album of quiet favorites in my mine, in there with Ashley Judd, Kate Winslet, Lisa Nicole Carson, Lucy Liu and Aunjanue Ellis as female actresses who know how to play the part, even if their skills haven't gotten the props they fully deserve as of yet.

I'm sure that she'll be a topic of discussion in James Toback's 'Tyson', which I'm going to check out tomorrow night. I can still see her standing there in the dark: flawless kind, big pretty eyes and the curly brown hair that would become the signature look of a certain type I was into for awhile. It's crazy to think that that was more than 20 years ago. It's crazy to think that I remember those few moments like yesterday. Looking back she was my first Orange Crush, an electric citrus smile in a trenchoat with Agent Provocateur underneath.
The last time I got that in real life it was a body stocking and she was out of breath from climbing two flights of stairs. End of line.

The Muse

2009-05-05T10:15:00.000-07:00

"It's prettier here," Frank, the man who will probably become my regular mechanic, says as he studies the rust deposits around the front wheel wells of my car.

I was raised not to trust mechanics. So whenever I start a relationship with a new one I feel like a once-abused spouse starting over, hoping and praying that I'm not falling for someone else looking to get over on me.

His words make me think of two different things at once. The first is about a conversation I had with an old friend I met up with for brunch. She told me how brave she thought I was for dumping most of my life and heading for points west in search of a new career. To her that was more impressive than if I had done 360 loops in a bi-plane. I told her that I didn't do it fearlessly. She reminded me that no one is without fear. The challenge is in whether or not you allow your fears to control you.

The second thought was of my homeboy back East and convo we'd had years ago about being artists and about wishing that we had bona fide muses. In case you don't know the term "muse" goes back to the Greeks [if not before] Muses were magical women who served as inspiration. I don't remember their story too well and don't feel like looking up so if you want to know more consult your local wiki. Unlike him I've had my share of muses, women who usually took the form of significant others who tended to love reading as much as I loved writing. But it wasn't so much that I needed them in order create. I just liked the feedback. Years later, I'm not sure if I'll ever be as open to that kind of sharing again. I don't think I can afford that kind of co-dependency out here in Hell-A.

For one so many folks here walk around dripping with their own insecurities dripping from their sleeves. They have this need to show the world that they belong here. And if they don't have the right stuff themselves, they can easily attach themselves to someone who does. Here, the right circumstances and the right moves in the pelvic region and you can weave yourself a nice comfy quilt of an existence. Folks on the rise out here always know exactly what they want, which makes it far easier to determine their motives, particularly when they're not in line with your own.

As I came out here for the job, I'm happy to be starting my first one today, a screenplay for a small-budget indie based on true events. Though I'll miss my view of the city streets I left behind to live in this glorified suburb, I'm geeked to see the final product of my first work for hire here. I'm geeked to get back into my exercise routine. In the mornings here the birds are louder than the traffic as the sun makes it climb. I like that. I missed that. Now it's time to make the donuts. I'll let you know when they're ready ;) End of line.

Ellroy, Elwood and Me

2009-05-04T09:41:00.001-07:00

There have been blessings abound in my short little life. For one I've never had to have surgery, broken a bone or stayed overnight in a hospital. For another, I've managed to carve out a career for myself as a working, professional artist. And perhaps most importantly, for the sake of this blog, I've had a chance to meet many of my favorite artists and muses. Such was the case on this past Saturday.

While I can't say that I'm a James Ellroy afficionado, I did love LA Confidential the movie. I was equally intrigued by the special Showtime did on him a few years back before they'd made The Black Dahlia into a film. The bottom line is that he's part of what may be the last solid generation of crime writers, standing next to guys like Richard Price, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane and a number of others. He also happened to be a boxing party a friend was throwing for the Pacquiao/Hatton ass-whipping over the weekend. And so was I. Somewhere between a night of boxing knockouts, I found myself having pizza and convo with Ellroy and another fellow scribe, Elwood Reid.

The eye of our discussion was about the state of the book business and how mid-list authors like myself and Reid can easily end up in the worst kind of position as publicity and marketing efforts by major houses have become even more discriminating. As the market of those who read for fun, particularly fiction, is likely to go out with the Baby Boomers, the days of six-figure advances and lavish tours for most of us are deader than fried chicken. It was surprising to hear Ellroy and I to have names and ideas in common. Out here, where a book is the best place to hide anything you don't want development execs to find out about, it was good to be in the company of men who are still as much in love with prose as I am. It was even better to know that I wasn't alone. L.A. can sometimes makes you feel like you're all alone. But I'm not. I've never been. My ego has been bruised. Some of my dreams have been broken. But we scribes are still standing. The game may be changing but our love for it is still the same.

The Spark

2009-05-03T07:30:00.000-07:00

I could have been somebody. I could've been a contender. I could have, through the right set of choices and coincidences, found myself as a much simpler man, an Average Joe working an average gig for an average but consistent paycheck. I could have shut my laptop once and for all, gone to culinary to school, and been working the line in the molten kitchen of some New York bistro. I could have married a number of women who were the worst thing for me, or had a meteoric rise before a hard crash and burn. I could have drowned myself to death in wine women, squeezing my third eye shut in the light of a new day. These alternate lives were my fantasy, my escape from something I felt like I was put here to do: the writing racket. It's how I've made a living since I was 14, and I'm not stopping anytime soon.

The paragraphs above can pretty much sum of my last attempt at a blog here in cyberspace. I was a moody, ambitious know-it-all punk who got his ass kicked all over the place because it was the only way for me to understand that I was not in control. The universe was leading me toward something and fighting it would only make it more complicated. So I, dead center in the middle of recession, left the apartment I'd called home for seven years and made my way to Los Angeles in my grandmother's old Honda in search of a my own slice of the Hollywood cake. And things are finally starting to roll.

So here I am: an unapologetic nerd with a gift who is both seen and not seen. These words are perhaps the only evidence of the not so beautiful struggles I endure everyday. In the name of the paper chase, feeding my unborn babies and the overwhelming desire to make art that moves the world, I have give up my rights as public critic, personal smartass and out and outspoken hired gun to infiltrate the most influential system on the planet and take a few specks of sand off its endless beaches for myself. As I am now nameless and faceless, a voice amongst the select few inside the ultimate boys club in search of my seat on the row of nominees at the Oscars, my place at the table for the Emmys and the chance at a life free of the average joe box I so desperately wanted to fill. It's not just that I want to be there. It's that the right people have been telling me my whole life that's its where I belong, a crown I am destined to claim. I done wrestling with destiny. For the here and now it's all about world domination. End of line.