The Wayward Traveler: Part I

Feast or famine. That’s what I’m always hearing about this business and it’s that uncertainty that keeps things interesting—you never know what the next job is going to be or when it’s going to come. And when that opportunity comes to make to make a few bucks, you better believe you won’t know what you gorged on until you’ve eaten yourself into a stupor.

I couldn’t stop grinning when I saw my bedroom at the hotel. Surely, I had a skipped a few chapters in the big book of my life to end up in a split level room with my own fireplace and minibar, complete with a collection of red wines and a chrome cork remover. Just the weekend before, I was in New Jersey for a music video, where the cork remover was conveniently mounted next to the toilet. There’s something poignant to be said about status in society and what you’ll find next to a toilet.

Los Angeles: land of bittersweet memories. The last time I was here, I was piled under scripts and suffering a bit of a burnout. Now, I was sucking down raw oysters and exquisitely cooked Hawaiian Opah and Mojitos.

Mindblowing. I’m the sort of guy that doesn’t mind eating stale bread, the sort of guy that’d be happy with a bit of manual labor and a bit of cheap beer at the end of the day, and here I was hobnobbing with the VP of HBO original entertainment, the CEO of Comcast, Oscar winners and multi-million dollar producers. Living big, spending bigger.

It was too mind-blowing to even put in entertaining, humorous prose. So I won’t. I’m too tired and out of practice with my words to describe how exciting but draining such a trip could be.

All I can say is that if there’s some sort of cosmic conservation of good experiences to bad, I’m badly due for a kick in the groin in the near future.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll have to pack for Asia.

The Wayward Traveler: Part I

Feast or famine. That’s what I’m always hearing about this business and it’s that uncertainty that keeps things interesting—you never know what the next job is going to be or when it’s going to come. And when that opportunity comes to make to make a few bucks, you better believe you won’t know what you gorged on until you’ve eaten yourself into a stupor.

I couldn’t stop grinning when I saw my bedroom at the hotel. Surely, I had a skipped a few chapters in the big book of my life to end up in a split level room with my own fireplace and minibar, complete with a collection of red wines and a chrome cork remover. Just the weekend before, I was in New Jersey for a music video, where the cork remover was conveniently mounted next to the toilet. There’s something poignant to be said about status in society and what you’ll find next to a toilet.

Los Angeles: land of bittersweet memories. The last time I was here, I was piled under scripts and suffering a bit of a burnout. Now, I was sucking down raw oysters and exquisitely cooked Hawaiian Opah and Mojitos.

Mindblowing. I’m the sort of guy that doesn’t mind eating stale bread, the sort of guy that’d be happy with a bit of manual labor and a bit of cheap beer at the end of the day, and here I was hobnobbing with the VP of HBO original entertainment, the CEO of Comcast, Oscar winners and multi-million dollar producers. Living big, spending bigger.

It was too mind-blowing to even put in entertaining, humorous prose. So I won’t. I’m too tired and out of practice with my words to describe how exciting but draining such a trip could be.

All I can say is that if there’s some sort of cosmic conservation of good experiences to bad, I’m badly due for a kick in the groin in the near future.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll have to pack for Asia.

Butt of the Joke

My life has the sad frequency of becoming my best joke.

As a teenager, my parents would ask what I wanted for my birthday, as all well meaning parents do. Not one to ask for much more than food, I would always ask in my lamest, puberty-absent voice for a pony. Everyone would laugh as if to say, “We get it. You’re not spoiled like the other horrible children you hang out with,” and we’d call it a day. That went on for eight years till my 16th birthday, when my family decided to play the ultimate joke and throw a party with dozens of prancing pink ponies. There was a pink pony piñata, a “My Little Pony” play doll complete with ribbons and brushes, and enough other pastel colored goods to make the most machismo of 16-year-olds puke a rainbow. Not to be outdone, I pretended to love the pony dolls and played with them in front of my parents until they started to worry.

Years passed and I still didn’t learn my lesson: I joked at my high school graduation that I was moving into my parents’ house till 35. In college, that age rose to 42. We all had a good laugh, imagining a much fatter and balder me stumbling out onto the block to pick up the morning paper. It was funny because we knew what that meant, the ultimate failure of failures: a man armed with wasted potential, unable to fly free from the nest to experience the world.

And six years since that birthday to end all birthdays, I’ve moved back in with the folks.

In some ways I had flown the nest, crossed the country to see what all the fuss was about in LA. But after a few months of the city, I decided it wasn’t my thing. The timing wasn’t right, I argued, not with student loans, a looming recession, and a nasty spell of burnout on the horizon. To be honest, they were all excuses. I was scared and there were many things I would have to leave back on the East Coast. I felt a bit like that man who had to cut his hand off when he got it stuck while rock climbing. Yes, I would have a fully functioning stump of a life after cutting loose, but who knows what fun I would have had with that hand. So many metaphorical things to feel, so many itches to scratch…yes, circumstances would change, but for the time being, why not dangle off the Cliffside and enjoy the view?

My family has been quick to usher be back into the home—A tight fit physically and mentally. My father, who always seems to have advice, has turned every dinner into a career intervention on my behalf—advice I’m not so quick to take, especially coming from a man who suggested I sell fruit pies as a summer job. “Pies?” I asked. I was talking about selling blood or sperm for cash when my father had to take things into the realm of weird. “You want me to bake and sell pies?”

“People like pies. You can even bake them right here in the house and get your brothers involved.” He explained how we could canvas the town and buy fruit by the ton the way I would have talked about shoveling driveways at 14. Despite the fact that none of us had any real experience commercial cooking, my father continued to expand on his scheme till he saw clear plans for a franchise. We would have laughed, but he sounded awfully serious. “Pies,” he said, chewing thoughtfully on his rice. “Yes… pies. That’s the ticket.”

On the other hand, my mother had gotten the curious notion that she should become a matchmaker—and by that, I mean my matchmaker, arranging all sorts of “run-ins” with girls that cross her path. Despite her loose command of the English language, she strangely manages to put me into these compromising situations without a hitch. This shouldn’t be a surprise to me by now: we are, after all, talking about a woman that could tell you that she loves your southern accent as smoothly as she would tell you that your house smells like ass—And have you smiling for it either way.

“Why, isn’t she pretty?” A bunch of college students were working a tent for Boston Children’s Hospital and my mom was looking at this poor girl who had a car battery and LCD screen strapped to her stomach. She was attractive enough; clear skinned, athletic, and waddling around like a woman pregnant with a home entertainment system.

“Yes she is. And just to be clear,” I warn, “You set me up, you die.” I turn my back to help my brother play one of the games in the tent. No more than ten minutes later, I hear my mother making small talk with the girl.

“Journalism! MY SON writes too!” My mother exclaims. “HE just graduated from BU—in fact HE just got back from LA…” each word is accentuated in such a way to give me the go ahead to join the conversation. To make sure I get the message, she jabs me in my back.

“Ow” I say.

“That’s him!” my mom says. “You wouldn’t happen to be giving out shirts in his size?” My mom asks. She points to a shirt my brother has run out with from the tent.

“Well, they only come in small. Sorry!” the girl replies.

“That’s no problem. My Joseph here loves to wear tight shirts to show off his MUSCLES!” My mom gleefully grabs my bicep—and the girl does likewise.

“Nice” they both say.

As soon as we’re out of sight, my mom slaps me across the shoulders for accusing her of playing God with my love life. “I’m not setting you up. I’m merely,” She pauses to look for the right word, “brightening her day.” With that, we walked off to watch a street performer.

Between being fondled in Quincy Market and planning the family’s pie empire, I’ve had plenty of time to wonder why my life sounds like one bad punch line after another—and wondering what the next joke will be. It’s certainly given me plenty of material to chew on, and despite the lack of a job, my gut still tells me that I made the right move to come home. “Why couldn’t I have just liked LA, or found some ridiculously good paying job? Why is my family so weird?” I find myself asking God these sorts of questions late at night. “What’s going to happen to me? Why isn’t this easy?”

Nothing’s easy. Is the answer I hear back. Besides, it’d be a terrible bore, wouldn’t it?

‘sides, I DO have plans for you—plans to prosper you and not harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then, you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.

“Cool.” I say

There’s a good boy. Now, pull my finger.

Bottleneck

If there’s one consistent complaint among residents in LA, it’s the traffic.

I was driving to my internship one morning when the radio newscaster reported three separate rollovers on the freeway, and although accidents are common in the metro LA area, it would’ve taken nothing less than sheer determination on the part of the drivers to flip over in bumper to bumper traffic. In my head, I saw that man on his cell phone, that woman putting mascara on as they pulled onto the road. “I can do this. This is ok” they say as they gun it into a jersey barrier, sending a shower of glass and iced non-fat mocha latte with whip cream and a chocolate swirl onto the city streets below.

I had survived years of New England shenanigans and a cross-country road trip, but nothing compared to the demolition derby antics of LA. You’d think action movies choreograph their car chases—they probably just tape LA during rush hour. The remnants of the chaos litter the roads: a hub cap here, a mangled shopping cart there. “It’s not a mess,” the locals quip, “It’s the weekly commute.” Incidentally, there’s a myth where if you get into a car accident within the first year of moving to LA, you’re going to become an Angelino, a permanent resident of the city of Los Angeles. It makes asking the question of why people drive badly sound like you’re asking why tall people play basketball or why rapists frequent jails. They just do.

But I digress.

Sure enough, I saw the freeway and onramp in the distance, clogged with cars. Pulling onto the freeway was clearly going to be a bad life decision from any vantage point, yet the blinkers around me flared up as drivers continued to squeeze to the right, blocking my route and turning a 30 minute commute into an hour long smog fest. Sure, there were other ways these yokels me could go East and West, but when the highway was the “easiest” and well worn route to your destination, why bother changing plans?

I had been in LA for nearly five months now, and though the sunny weather was great for the first month, the consistent 70 degree weather blurred the weeks into a haze. You go to the internship; you read a script. You go to class; you talk about business. You go home; you eat your frozen dinner. You go to bed; you fall asleep reading another script. It’s not to say that I didn’t appreciate the opportunity to be out on the west coast, but the edges of my dream world had long since cracked, and I was beginning to have a horrible feeling that I wasn’t going to be happy in LA.

I worked two internships, one at an agency and another at a big-but-small film production company. At the former, I ran around to make photocopies, phone calls, summaries for scripts, and the like. I was surrounded by friendly, sleep-deprived college grads working as assistants for the agents. They all hoped to jump to another assistant job and climb the food chain. The latter yielded much of the same—except I’m working with an agent’s assistant that made the jump to the other assistant job, only he’s looking ahead to hopefully jump to another job to climb the corporate ladder.

I learned a lot about how to maintain a calendar for a boss and what the process was in turning a 120 page script into a 90 minute feature, but what I really learned was the type of life I had spent four years preparing for. There were no crazy stories to tell, no wild nights of adventure. Life is spent under the dull glow of a florescent bulb, moving at the speed of your blackberry. Your lunches, dinners, and drinks are strictly planned out for networking opportunities. You drink sparkling water and read bad scripts. Your friends are your industry-mates, and your industry-mates are your competitors. Some might like the lifestyle, but I found it lacking in several departments—and try as I might, I couldn’t see it as fulfilling work.

“But this is what development is,” one assistant told me. “It pays, and you get to be creative.”

“Creative? But you’re not writing, or making creative decisions” I replied.

He turned away from his online game of scrabble and sighed. “What do you think the corkboard in the office is for?” He pointed at the board in the next room. Mounted on the wall, the corkboard sat empty, save for a few stray tacks and a barrage of staples that held ideas long gone since I arrived. “Besides, you don’t really want to go through the hassle of writing. You hire writers to put your ideas in for you.”

I nodded, and he pondered his next scrabble move. It was true I was still green and unaccustomed to the business, but to me, it didn’t make sense. I had expected the late nights, the coffee runs, the insults, and yelling. What I hadn’t expected was how meaningless it all felt. Never had I felt so alone, so confused about my goals and if I’d be wasting my time working my way up the ranks. It was said over and over that sometimes you had to do the things you hate to get what you want, but what if I didn’t want that prize at the top of the ladder?

You can drag me out into the streets and beat me for saying this, but the one thing that I had wanted to do from day one was tell great stories, live a life worth living, and make enough money to afford the value menu. THAT’S what I thought was in LA, and that’s why I followed the thousands of other kiddos who followed the bright lights into the big city. We clog the streets with our misguided dreams and get lost in the shuffle. We get so desperate to be a part of the process we shove ourselves into any job we can get—because if we don’t, someone else will. “You come to LA, make the connections, and get a job,” my professors told me. “You can do it other ways, of course, but it’ll be harder.” Perhaps we make it hard on ourselves, because we compromise what we believe and want for what worked easiest in the past.

Fate, so it seems, has a funny way of making decisions for you. Stricken with money issues that would make a jump out to LA impossible, I’ve had to pack my backs and bid tinsel town farewell. So I left LA. I packed my little yellow car and headed out east on the freeway past the hundreds of drivers inching their way into the city. My life may take me back out to LA, but for the moment, it looks like I’ll be taking the side streets.

Walk a Mile

“I’m so proud of you Joe, that’s the first interesting thing you’ve said!” The intern leaned over and patted my shoes, the closest thing he could touch with me across on the sofa. We had been casually talking about previous jobs and I happened to bring up my experiences in a sweat shop. Of course, the job wasn’t technically a sweat shop job but working in the basement of a rundown textile factory with a chain-smoking, disability check collecting grandmother for less than three dollars an hour was close enough in my book. With that, both the assistant and fellow intern chuckled in approval.

“Now if we could only get you to tell interesting stories all the time,” said the assistant. I couldn’t argue with that. I often come off as the silent type with the personality of a shoe horn in new situations.


“One step at a time.” The intern said. “Though we still have to work on your fashion sense.” I followed his gaze to my shoes.


The assistant laughed. “Oh, those sketchers”


I asked what was wrong with my sketchers. If anything, I was proud of my brand new black and white sneakers. Bought before I left for LA, the shoes were my first steps to becoming the polished LA yuppie.

“They’re knockoffs. Extremely derivative of other shoes.” The intern spun around in the office chair and sighed.

Normally I’d take an insult like a wimp—and I figured today wasn’t a day to start breaking habits. Enlighten me, I said. Asked what he would have bought.

“Saucony…Steve Madden…I dunno. Not Sketchers. There’s a hierarchy to it.” Said the assistant.

Luckily for me, I brought a pair of Doc Martins too.

The intern coughed. “That’s so last season.” Somehow, I knew mentioning how I got them on sale wouldn’t have helped.

“You know what your problem is?” asked the assistant. “You still shop at Gap and Old Navy, right?”

I tugged nervously at my Gap shirt and Old Navy jeans and asked what his point was.

“Well, you need to start shopping at Banana Republic, buddy”

I didn’t know all that much about fashions and what was in and out, but I distinctly remember browsing the Banana Republic after I picked up my shoes. Sixty for a single pair of jeans, twenty for a polo shirt, a hundred for a jacket. Two whole combinations would have been worth more than my entire wardrobe. I could have bought dozens of sketchers with that money. Two months worth of groceries. Crack Cocaine. Luckily for me, my mom taught me how to shop clearance at Filenes and still have plenty left for food. Besides, Banana Republic, Gap, & Old Navy all used the same supplies and labor. Namely, Asian children.

“Nope. My shirt was made in Turkey. You pay for quality.” Something in the way the assistant said it reminded me of my distant uncle in New York. He worked in China Town making jeans, but I felt he meant a very different thing when he said it. The assistant leaned over his desk and said, “Look, if you want to work in this business, you got to dress the part, that’s all there is to it.” His blackberry buzzed and he began tapping out a reply.

Days later, the mailroom brought in a package for the assistant. Ripping it open, the assistant lit up as he pulled out a brand new pair of jeans, direct from Washington D.C. He ducked out to the bathroom and returned sporting the jeans. Black and form fitting, he waltzed around the office like a kid with a new toy.

“Don’t they look good? Only paid a hundred for them.”

I agreed; they were a great pair of jeans. He sat down again and began to browse the catalogs while I thought about what I’d cook for dinner.

It's Not Perfect...

...but it's a start. More to come when I have the time (and the material)

Doppleganger

It felt as if my life had come to an end. Coming home from my classes, I found that my roommate had conveniently popped a piece of mail on my desk- which was strange, considering most of us in the apartment never got mail. Naturally, I opened the envelope, and naturally, I almost crapped my pants when I saw it was my credit card statement with thousands of dollars in charges I never made.

Let me tell you, there’s only one thing that sucks more than having your identity being stolen— and that’s having it stolen by someone who makes you feel like they use it better than you. Every one of the charges made on that statement was made to a charity or a foundation. Apparently, I was a savior to the poor, champion of the weak, and quite the fellow with the ladies. Well, the battered ones, anyhow.

Ok, buy a flat screen television, a car, drugs, but a well for an African village? Yeah, it was my money—but looking for some upside to the situation— I had to admit this was one of the ways I always thought I could help the world-given the money-and that got me thinking. On one hand was me with the big dream of making it big in Hollywood, and on the other hand there was this desire to live for something more than a fat wallet and a house in the hills. When I thought about it, it boiled down to a struggle between being selfish and selfless, with the question of whether I could ever combine to two...

Then I realized no matter how I spun it, I was screwed—until I found out that the bill was for someone else with the exact same name as me (go figure). But still, in the search for answers (and a job) I’ve decided to head out west- waay out west to Los Angeles. So from hereon out you’ll find my journey. To be honest, it’s scary- people have warned me that Los Angeles can swallow you whole and spit out plastic, and hopefully that’s not what happens. And who knows, maybe I won’t find what I’m looking for, but I have to try because, you know, Life is short. And then you die.