Drift Reality

Well, we had our first shoot this past weekend and it was an overwhelming success. I want to say thanks to everyone who participated in making it such a great experience. Basically, with the exception of being hassled a few times by cops and airport security (we DID get clearance to shoot there beforehand), everything went as well as I had envisioned. Siavash (the lead character) and Hooman (his cousin and accompanying lead) were tremendous, and Pouria and George (guys behind the camera) were also excellent. Right now, we have a shared vision and we are just playing off of one another’s energy. That being said, I think what will make or break this documentary is if everyone can maintain this energy when things lose their initial flair, but I have a good feeling about it. This coming week, we have two shoots scheduled (weather permitting) for Saturday and Sunday, so I’ll keep you guys updated as they happen.

Later that same day, Kelly came over again and she regaled us with tales of her adventures at Monzu, a foo-foo restaurant in La Jolla where she worked as a hostess.

“I just can’t be bothered with being nice to these old men that ask for my phone number anymore,” she said. “I don’t know what it is about these old men that makes them think that I would be interested in them. And they always give me their business cards, what is it with the business cards?”

The way that Kelly spoke made me feel that there was absolutely no interval between the point at which a thought entered her mind and the point at which she would externalize said thought. It was a perpetually flowing waterfall of dialogue that at times seemed to defy gravity by flowing in preposterously disconnected directions. At one point she would be talking about old men trying to seduce her at work, one second later, she would be talking about her friend at home who only dated black guys, and one second later, she would have returned to her original train of thought. At the same time, whenever someone responded, she listened intently at what they were saying.

I personally found it to be extremely entertaining - talking with her was like stumbling upon a tree bearing an endless variety of fruits and having the luxury to pick whatever you felt like at that point in time.

Kelly’s endless line of dialogue turned towards one of her friends who had started an internet-based business back in Virginia and become rather successful, Karl’s ever-present entrepreneurial spirit prompted him to reply to me, “I still don’t know why we couldn’t do the same thing with Roaring Fish.”

Karl was, of course, referring to a company that we had attempted to start, creating web pages for small businesses. There were two main stumbling blocks to our companies progress: one being the fact that neither of us were any good at web-design, the other being that neither of us had ever had any experience with finding clients. Our company’s first and only client had been one a family friend who wanted us to create a website showcasing her artwork. That had more or less, been the pinnacle of our companies’ success. Shortly thereafter, Roaring Fish had taken a turn for the worse as we failed to land any more clients. At one point, Karl had walked into a used-lamp store and asked if the proprietor wanted us to create a website for her, to which she had responded in the negative, and shortly after this incident, our company folded and dissolved into the endless void of the internet.

To this day, Karl had maintained that if we had been more aggressive in our pursuit of clients, we would have eventually found success, which is what prompted him to respond in the manner that he did when Kelly had brought up the example of her friend who had successfully started his own business.

“Roaring Fish didn’t fail because we weren’t aggressive pursuing clients,” I said.

“It failed because about a million people thought of the same idea years before we did.”

“We need to find a niche, something that no one has though of before,” Karl said. “Like, like,” Karl muttered. “Like down in Pacific Beach,” he continued. “Remember when James had said that he wondered why there wasn’t any ice cream carts down on the beach?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Well, maybe it’s just because no one has thought about doing that yet,” he responded and I could tell that he was beginning to get excited.

“Maybe it’s because the zoning regulations in Mission Beach don’t allow ice cream trucks,” I responded.

“Then we figure out what the zoning rules are, and we figure out a way around them. That is how you have to do business, you have to be able to do things that other people wouldn’t think of,” Karl said.

Karl was starting to get an inspired look in his eye and there was something about it that bothered me and I couldn’t figure out what it was.

“You have to find something like that, which no one has done before, sacrifice a few years getting it together and making your money, and then once it is set up, you get out and just enjoy the fruits of your labor.”

“Karl,” I responded, trying to get his attention.

“And then, you can do whatever you want,” he concluded with more than a little self-satisfaction present in his voice.

“I disagree completely,” I responded, which happened to be one of my favorite ways to begin a rebuttal. “I think you do something you are interested in and everything else follows.”

“Wouldn’t you rather have the freedom to do whatever you are interested in without worrying about money,” Karl responded. “You work hard for about three years, and then you are free to do whatever you want.”

“Three years?” I said, repeating his estimate. “Three years to set up a profitable business that will support you for the rest of your life?”

“Okay, maybe five or six years,” he responded.

“If you tell anyone who has started their own business and been successful, that it only takes five years, I think they would laugh in your face. Besides,” I continued. “Let’s say that it does only take five years, that is still five years of your life that you are essentially throwing away, and for what?”

“For the freedom to do whatever you want for the rest of your life,” he answered.

“I think you find something you love, and you do that, and everything will come to you in due time.”

From out of the corner of my eye, I could see Kelly nodding in agreement.

“I think it’s safe to assume,” I continued, making eye contact with both Kelly and Karl. “That all of us are going to be financially secure by the time we’re about forty. It’s just a matter of what we do in those intervening years that determines whether or not we are happy. Personally, I don’t care how much money I have when I’m forty, if I had spent the past fifteen years selling ice-cream to get there. Ultimately, I’d rather be at age forty, making a decent living, with fifteen years of memories, doing the things I loved, than be a forty-year-old millionaire with fifteen years of memories of ice-cream.”

I looked out of the corner of my eye again and could see Kelly smiling. Karl thought for a moment before saying, “I don’t know, I guess I just think differently.”

Later that same evening, the three of us went to a local dive bar and had drinks. Images of meeting a cute girl without much of a personality and for once in my life, not asking her for her phone number. Talking with Kelly about our respective sexual pasts, her face close to mine, staring into her eyes, and then returning home and seeing her and Karl disappear into his room. Through a door left slightly ajar, I caught a glimpse of them sitting on his bed. She was lying on her stomach as he massaged her shoulders.

Rodrick wears his white socks pulled up like an old-school basketball player. There is about five inches of pasty flesh between the tips of his socks and the bottom edge of his shorts, which had once been white, but had since evolved into more of a cream color. A long black Pittsburgh Steelers t-shirt is draped over his withered torso and the neckline has been stretched out enough that it reveals a thin white patch of his chest hair.

His skin hue is only a shade darker than his creamy white shorts and the only element of color on his entire body that echoes of life is his faded blue eyes. He is a hunchback not in the question-mark/45 degree angle/”I’m sort-of a hunchback” meaning of the word, but rather in the perpendicular to the Earth/Sphinx riddle three legged creature/”I’m a full blown hunchback” manner.

As far as I can tell, Rodrick’s hobbies include walking to and from the 7-11 down the block and breathing. Being the shirker that I am, I often find myself lounging on the floor of my living room, by the large window that opens onto Sixth Avenue, which allows me an unfettered view of pedestrians.

In a self-serving effort to increase my karma, I sometimes notice when Rodrick walks by my window and I pause my game of Madden ‘97 and walk outside to open the door for him. Three legged creatures have a hard time opening doors sometimes. I also make an effort to greet him whenever I see him, and he responds softly in a child-like voice.

One day as I am opening the door for him, he looks up at me with his faded blue eyes and asks whether or not I am Jewish.

“No,” I answer. “I’m not Jewish.”

“You look Jewish,” says Rodrick, which is strange because being half-Korean and half-Iranian, I look anything but Jewish. I quickly add that to the list of various races I’ve been mistaTim for (which includes Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, Italian, Chilean, Filipino, amongst others) and politely smile at him.

“I’m not Jewish.”

“Is Tim Jewish?” He asks while cocking his head to the side.

“No, Tim’s not Jewish either.”

“What is Tim?”

“Tim is Italian and Polish,” I answer. I silently wonder if Rodrick, thinking neither of us are Jewish, is going to just walk by and into his apartment without every speaking to either of us again.

“I’m sorry,” he begins. “It’s just that you are so polite, I thought you were Jewish.”

“Nope, not Jewish,” I answer.

“I would like to get to know you guys,” Rodrick proclaims boldly.

“That sounds great,” I respond.

“Well, okay,” Rodrick says as he lurches by. “What is your name?”

“My name is John, and yours?”

“My name is Rodrick, nice to meet you Jamie.”

A few days later, I hear my doorbell ring and it is Rodrick in his black Steelers t-shirt with the low-hanging neckline and pulled up white socks.

“Hello Rodrick, how are you doing,” I ask.

“Hi Jeremy,” he begins, and then looks to the side nervously. “I have a favor to ask, but maybe I won’t ask it.”

“What is it?” I answer, hoping that he isn’t about to ask me to knock somebody off for him or something crazy like that.

“Well,” he begins as he looks in my direction, still not making eye contact with me, “I need to go to the bank on 5th and University and it’s really cold outside and it’s just that my back starts to ache when it’s cold. And the bus comes every twenty minutes,” looking up at me, he concludes: “I was hoping you might give me a ride?” Then, thinking for a moment he adds, “Do you even have a car?”

I let out a quiet snort of amusement at his question and answer, “No, I don’t have a car.” An image of me jogging to the store, carrying Rodrick on my back, appears and then disappears quickly.

“But Tim has a car. When Tim comes back a bit later, we’ll take you to the bank.”

“No, it’s all right,” Rodrick says with a slight tinge of resignation, “I can just take the bus, it’s not a problem.”

“No, we will take you. Really.”

“No, I don’t want to trouble you.”

I resist the urge to grab him and shake him while shouting “We’ll give you a ride god damnit, now stop being ridiculous!” and instead say, “Let me get your phone number so I can call you when Tim gets back.”

His smile breaks into a genuine smile of relief as I walk inside to get a pen. “Thanks Jeremy,” he says.

“Actually, it’s John.”

“How do you spell that?”

“Let me write it down for you,” I say as I reach for another yellow stick-it.

I hand him my phone number and he turns to leave. Abruptly, his eyes widen and he asks, “Do you want to see my house?”

I look at him and say “Sure.”
While we were walking down the hall, Rodrick asked if I knew anyone who needed a room to rent. Although I did have a friend, Jamie, who needed a room, but the image of Jamie stumbling in drunk at 3:00 in the morning and mistaking Rodrick for a futon prevented me from mentioning his name.

When I lived in Washington, DC, I had a similar experience in which I walked into an elderly couple’s house and all of a sudden felt as though I was going to drown in an overwhelmingly large cache of junk. Newspapers and furniture were scattered around in a chaotic mess that made me feel a bit lightheaded. It was a slight shock therefore, when I walked into Rodrick’s apartment and saw that it was pristine. There were jade Buddha statues surrounded by a tasteful array of plants in one corner of the room and a home theatre entertainment system in another. The room was furnished with a rouge-colored matching living room set, adorned with intricate wood patterning.

“Your house is very nice Rodrick,” I commented while walking in.

“Thank you,” he answered. “I used to be an interior decorator,” he said as he walked towards the extra room that he wanted to rent out.

It was an extension of the dining room, which had a flimsy sliding-door partition. Like the rest of his house, it was immaculate. It contained a bathroom, which I noted with interest, was substantially larger than the one that Tim and I shared.

“Looks really nice Rodrick,” I stated while enviously scrutinizing the bathroom. Rodrick pulled a chair out of from underneath his sparkling glass dining room table and sat down with a sigh of relief.

“After I got out of the army, I studied interior design at the University of Austin, Texas,” he began. “I did some interior design in Texas before coming here, but everyone out here wanted oak and that really turned me off of it. So I decided to go into the jewelry and pawnshop business.”

Realizing that it was quite rude to stand up while he talked, I quickly glanced around the room. Looking down at a chair, I realized that this could turn into a long-affair if I sat down, so I instead opted to lean against the wall.

“Okay,” I said.

“I made a lot of money in the business but I started taking black angels, do you know what black angels are?”

“No.”

“Amphetamines, black angels? You wouldn’t know, that was before your time. You’ve probably heard of white spiders then.”

“No,” I answered curiously. What the hell was he gabbing on about, I wondered.

“Speed, I spent all of my money on speed.”

I noticed that all of a sudden my attention became completely focused. Rodrick proceeded to explain how he had once had as many as twenty-nine doctors, all selling him prescription amphetamines. He was a self-proclaimed “workaholic, who was addicted to speed.”

I glanced at his barren ring finger and resisted asking him about his family life.

“I go to these meetings at Stepping-Stone,” he said. “Do you know stepping stone?”

I did, as a matter of fact, know stepping-stone. When I had worked at the restaurant up the street, I had always passed by Stepping-stone and seen a group of people outside, smoking up a storm.

“Yes, I know Stepping-stone,” I responded.

“I go to Stepping-Stone every day. It is for people who are on drugs or alcohol. Sometimes people come up with stories that blow your mind. Do you remember that woman who drowned her children a while back?”

“Yes.”

“There are people who have stories like that, wives killing their husbands or their children.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “What?”

“Oh yeah, people will come up and say how they killed their wife or their husband, but it is all anonymous you know. What you say in there stays in there.”

“I think there is some law about people admitting to felonies breaking codes of confidentiality,” I responded, hoping that there was actually such a rule.

“Yeah, but you have to make a judgment call, you know. If you admit something like that, you might be doing a social justice, but then you’ll have all that hanging over your head.”

Not wanting to get into a debate, I simply stated, “Yeah, that sounds interesting. Maybe Tim and I should check that out sometime.”

“You’re straight. You can meet a lot of girls there,” Rodrick said and a slight snicker passed through my head at the concept of picking up girls at Stepping-Stone.

“Yeah, there are a lot of younger people there,” he continued, “and they are always exchanging phone numbers.”

“Tim might be interested in that,” I answered. “I have a girlfriend,” I said, which was a lie.

“Yeah, well, there are all kinds of stories there, just crazy stories that will blow your mind away.”

“Yeah, that sounds really interesting Rodrick, I think the three of us should go there at some point, listen, I have some work to do now, but I’ll call you when Tim gets back and we can go to the bank.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” he said. “I can just take the bus.”

Internally sighing, I used the most baritone voice I could muster, and responded, “Rodrick, we will take you to the bank, okay?”

“Thank you.”

As I walked out the door, he asked me if I had seen his cat and I noticed for the first time that there was a white lump in the corner of my room.

“He has won many awards,” Rodrick told me.

The cat, as if acknowledging that he was the object of attention, rolled over and looked at me. It was a white Persian cat with eyes that looked as if they were stained with blood. The fur around its eyes was pink. It looked sickly. “How old is it?” I asked.

“She’s about twelve years old.”

“She’s getting up there, huh?” I answered as I walked out the door.

And now I know that no one could have loved me like she did and that is probably the most important thing I can take from my experience. If you don’t know why, then it’s probably impossible for me to tell you because it won’t make any sense to you.

It’s not something that you can really come out and say because that would defeat the whole purpose of why it happened. How can I describe how she looked at me while I was sleeping? Or the way that she would stroke my hair in a way that would remind me of being a kid again and for a moment in time, everything was perfect and I could have died if it meant remembering that moment for eternity.

Or how despite all the shit she could find a way to chip away at my muddled soul until she found something inside of me that was worth recovering? Or how she was essentially the most singular wonderful thing that could have happened to me?

Waking up on a Sunday morning with her next to me, her smooth warmth pressed against mine, our mingling essence sparking me to consciousness of life in a delicately rare manner, superimposing images of childhood on existing frames of reality while lazily hovering my fingers over the small of her back, smelling the faded perfume interwoven with cigarette smoke from the previous night, that pain tingled fog in my head spreading into peaceful sleepiness drenched with her affection, opaquely aware of her soothing brightness over me.

It was all those different things for which I had been searching the Earth. I found it and I never realized it until it had passed me by. Transient statues of glorified life bludgeoned me into a sculpture of distorted proportions that was incapable of lucidity. They had pounded my eyes until my vision flew multitudinously and I became one of those insects upon that hill in Kang-Chun, living and dying in the breadth of a glance, twirling around life frantically until the dizziness became overwhelming and I was forced to immerse within myself.

One you are completely inside, it is the same as death: just one continuous sheet of black consciousness. Boredom turns to fear turns to hate turns to boredom and that’s when you realize what you had and didn’t realize, while you were concerned with the pursuit of glory you neglected happiness and you are left alone with nothing. Sitting immersed in dark, you begin to dwell on everything and anything. You see that energy that was once inside you, compelling you to dance and scream and cry and laugh and shout and fight and love and live and die, slowly fade as you push it away because, as you think to yourself, that is what growing up is about.

Sitting at your desk, you hear a song and begin to hum and something starts to grow: a resonance of your soul, but that was yesterday and now is today - time does not smile at soul you tell yourself, you grow up and see the real world you tell yourself, when you have people depending on you, you have to buckle down you tell yourself, I’m not a kid anymore you tell yourself. You tell yourself these things every day and push and grind and before you know it, you have arrived but where have your arrived?

Before you know it, you have more money than you could count in five lifetimes, you have vacations on the beach, and you have beautiful things. But you have lost life in the exchange and you realize that you got the short end of the stick. Frantically, in a desperate attempt to win back some of your chips, you hurl yourself into the atmosphere with reckless abandon. But it is too late, when you come to earth, you are dust.

Sensations flow from you like water until all that is left is consciousness. Visions pass like clouds in a state of ambivalent nihilism as you realize what had actually happened to you. Anger turns to apathy and slowly, you accept your fate - to die engulfed by boredom. Resigned acceptance of death seeps into your consciousness and you just sit there waiting for nothing.

Then, a very strange thing begins to happen: out of the corner of your eye, a spark flickers. As you tell yourself that it was a delusion, another spark flickers. As you watch intently, the sparks increase until you realize that they are revealing your black panel to be a window. You weren’t in darkness, you were just in a place that lacks light. Shapes and forms appear before you and then sensation reemerges.

Ready to do it over again?

Even after the fact, he could not seem to remove her eyes from inside of his mind. He remembered arriving at the club with Laura and immediately heading for the bar. He removed his heavy leather jacket and passed it across the bar to a girl with a chubby face on the other side.

He wanted to start dancing immediately and grabbing Laura’s hand, he weaved his way into the crowd of dancers. The pulsating rhythm was absorbed by his stomach, which sent the vibrations upwards - towards his head causing it to bob up and down in rhythm with the beat. All of the dancers in the room were facing the DJ but he turned his back on them so that he could face Laura as he danced with her.

He began to bob his hips the way that his old girlfriend had taught him. “You dance with your shoulders too much, you have to dance with your hips more,” she would say. He couldn’t argue because she looked pretty sexy when she danced whereas he looked like a guy who doesn’t feel comfortable dancing.

He closed his eyes and counted “one-two one-two,” trying to establish a feeling of rhythm in his body. His eyes fluttered and he caught a glimpse of a trio of what seemed like very attractive girls in the corner. They were dressed in that more fashionable, Apkujon-esque style which consisted of apparel that resembled business attire. He felt that they were talking about him because one of them leaned her head over to the other and pointed in his direction. He turned his eyes away quickly and looked at Laura. She was smiling at him and he smiled back at her.

Her face was quite appealing in this club but he knew that sometimes, when he examined her in the light, he could make out a forest of imperfections in the regions directly under and above her eyes. Her eyes themselves were cute when she smiled, but when her face was emotionless they seemed awfully small and beady. He smiled again and closed his eyes and tried to feel the rhythm: “one-two one-two.”

Soon, the trio was out of his mind and he was indulging in the music. Gradually, his body began to feel tired and he told Laura that he wanted to get a drink. She agreed and they headed towards the bar. One of the girls from the trio entered the periphery of his vision and he could not help but turn to look at her as she walked past. She stared directly into his eyes with a slight smile on her lips. Her eyes flickered with mischief and he found himself turning away quickly, but still thinking about her eyes. There was something peculiar about the way that they were shaped. They were thin at the corners but very large and round in the middle. They filled him with an odd type of excitement.

He looked towards the bartender, who was helping another customer. He strained his head and rotated it up and around, as if he was stretching out his neck, and his eyes alit on the girl once again. She was standing there, looking straight into his eyes. She had straight black hair that fell onto her shoulders and perfectly smooth skin. She had a small nose and above it were those exquisite eyes.

A smile creased onto his face and he turned his head away. He looked up at the bartender and ordered his drink.