MEMORIAL DAY

MEMORIAL DAY

I came home to find the toilet had exploded.

Not metaphorically. Sewage across the bathroom, the kitchen, the entryway. The apartment uninhabitable. I took photos, filed a maintenance request through the online portal, the only option available on a holiday weekend, and left.

I slept in my car.

It is Memorial Day. Every office is closed. The emergency line for my building wasn’t taking calls. I called 211. The referrals were for veterans or people on Skid Row. I am neither.

I drove back to my building and found the concierge. They gave me an emergency number. Maintenance is on its way. I am sitting in the lobby drinking free Keurig coffee, charging my phone.

There is something almost absurdly poetic about this. The wandering life, distilled to one moment.

WHAT I KNOW THIS MORNING

I know that things could be worse. I also know that knowing things could be worse is not the same as things being okay.

I know that I have been living in the same affordable housing apartment for over ten years. The price is irreplaceable. The apartment has kept me in a city I long ago stopped feeling necessary. It has been both shelter and cage.

I know that the work I do does not qualify as paid employment unless someone pays for it. When someone pays for it, the government takes notice in ways that complicate everything. This is the particular tax on making things in a world organized around other definitions of productivity. I have been navigating it for as long as I have been making things.

I know that I have a car that needs repairs I cannot afford. An unsupported phone that drops calls. A credit card nearly maxed. A minimal daily budget for food and gas that is already above what I can manage.

I know that I cannot think of a single person I would call to ask for a place to stay. Not because I have no one. Because I will not impose.

The hardest state for a human being to sustain is that of open-endedness. — Maria Popova, on Steinbeck’s Log from the Sea of Cortez

WHAT I HAVE BEEN BUILDING

I am a writer, director, composer, actor who has lived rootless, broke, moving country to country. The wandering is my voice. I meet people who reflect me back. I remember everything. I escape to other cities, other continents, other centuries, other lifetimes.

This week I spent two days at an acting intensive with one of the world’s great teachers of physical character work. I attended a zoom with an Italian writer. I met with a man to discuss producing a vertical drama series I wrote. We talked for hours. He is excited. He has not yet signed the deal memo I prepared.

My feature screenplay keeps advancing, directors, producers call to say they love it. I have been revising the script for weeks. None of this has converted to money yet.

Things move quickly until the money conversation. This has been true for as long as I can remember.

THE BEGINNING

My first union job I heard about at a summer Shakespeare production in Pennsylvania. I was a drummer onstage for the battle scenes. An actress friend playing Mistress Quickly told me about the one rare commercial audition in that neck of the woods and I booked it. Mistress Quickly moved to New York and invited me to visit. We went together to see headshot photographers. That headshot worked. After college when I moved to New York it landed me several soap opera auditions. I was called back for a two-year contract role on a major daytime drama.

I did not book it.

I have been in serious rooms my entire career. I have also been sleeping in my car, on a holiday Monday, drinking free coffee in a lobby, and lying in the sun waiting for maintenance to clean the sewage from my floor.

Both things have always been true simultaneously.

THE METHOD PROBLEM

A casting director once asked me to play it the opposite. Not because my work wasn’t real. Because it was too real. She wanted to confirm the craft was intentional, that there was a seam between me and the character. There was no seam. She could not do business with the character I was playing.

I have a thing I call hedge humor. It appears in my writing and in my life. A silliness that surfaces at critical moments to let people off the hook, to make the weight lighter before they have to ask me to. It is an apology. I take it out of the writing every time. In life I cannot always find it in time to remove it.

After a performance that left me shaking, a casting director gave me a moment to stop. Then he wanted to talk, not professionally. As friends. The work had done something that crossed the line between transaction and encounter.

People cannot always do business with what I bring into the room. They can be moved by it. They can want to be friends. The check is another matter.

I could feel the resignation in my chest even as I say my goodbyes. The feeling I get at the end of every audition, every interaction, even personal. The autonomic bracing for loss. The body learning, over a long time, to expect the ending before it arrives.

THE COMMUNITY ROOM

I am in the community room now. My nose is running. My eyes are watering.

The cleaning service for some reason diffuses artificial air fresheners throughout the space. They do this everywhere, gyms, community rooms, lobbies. The synthetic fragrance compounds are endocrine disruptors. For me, creative work disruptors.

I am writing this anyway. Through the synthetic lavender or whatever it is. The nose running is real. The watering eyes are real. The words are real. These things coexist.

THE FLOOR

I trained in dance. I know what a floor that holds feels like in the body. I know the difference between ground that supports movement and ground that swallows it.

I do not want safety as stasis. I want a floor firm enough to dance on.

I have been thinking about Baja California Sur. About a town in Oregon where I used to go every fall for the Shakespeare Festival, soaking in hot springs, seeing two shows a day for thirty dollars. About Porto, where the Douro River meets the Atlantic.

The work is portable. The industry is online. The wandering was never the problem. It was always the answer.

The Sea of Cortez is still there. Steinbeck was forty when he sailed it.

WHAT THE STEINBECK PIECE SAYS

Maria Popova wrote about Steinbeck’s Log from the Sea of Cortez. I read it this morning on my phone in the lobby while maintenance came to clean my apartment. She quotes him:

“Everything impinges on everything else… Everything is potentially everywhere.”

Steinbeck and his friend sailed the Sea of Cortez together in 1940 during a raging war, collecting specimens, thinking together, living together in genuine intellectual and human companionship. That is what I want. Not fame. Not money as an end. A floor firm enough to move from. People who see what I see. The moveable feast. The life of the mind and the heart shared with others who are genuinely present for it.

I have had glimpses of this. They are not accidents. They are the life I am describing, appearing briefly in the life I am living.

MAINTENANCE CALLED

They say the apartment will be ready tonight.

Tomorrow I have calls to make. Organizations that help people who make things and cannot always afford the consequences of making things.

Tonight I will send emails. I will finish the revisions on my screenplay. I will do the things not because I am certain they will work. I have not been certain of anything for a very long time. I will do them because stopping is not in my story.

The hardest state for a human being to sustain is that of open-endedness.

I am still open. I am still here.

The wandering is my voice.

rootlessfilms.com