Another Day In Hell

Something to Talk About

My first real girlfriend was younger than me. Not in a perverted sense, as I was 15 and she was 14 and a freshman in my high-school and had long Auburn hair and large blue eyes and pouty lips and came into the school with a boyfriend and when they broke up everyone wanted to date her but no one was taking the risks. I ran into her in the hallways and we'd make eye contact and later on, while I ran to my Civics class 5 minutes late because I was goofing off in the hallways I ran into her. Literally. We tumbled by the senior lockers and she landed right on top of my body as I twisted so she wouldn't get hurt. She quickly got up, embarrassed, but she smiled at me. I introduced myself and she said 'i know' and she introduced herself and it felt only appropriate to say, 'i know'. And 'Emily' laughed and I helped her pick up her books and she touched my hand as we reached for the same Geometry book and she blushed and grabbed her stuff and walked away and I went to class. For weeks we exchanged glances and my friends started talking about talking to her but I knew she wouldn't go for any of them. To be safe, though, I mustered up my self-confidence and locked myself in my room one night. I pulled out a notebook and diagramed every possible conversation we could have. From the Hello in the beginning to the Goodbye at the end. I created a sort of conversation tree so that there would be no silent awkward moments and drew pictures of things to talk about and had multiple answers to anything she could possibly ask me and I put in an old Dinosaur Jr. CD and picked up the phone and started dialing her number. After the third ring her mom picked up and I had called while they were having dinner and I felt like an idiot for doing that but 'Emily' excused herself from dinner for me and took the phone in her bedroom and we began to talk. Mostly it was about nothing. Me asking her about how she liked the new school, how her freshman year was, how her classes were. Then we talked about her ex and she was over him and, even though it wasn't written down in my notepad, I asked her 'why?' and she said 'because I like you now.' And here came the awkward silence. I tried to anticipate this but I never anticipated her saying that. But its the awkward silences like these that define relationships, when the awkwardness is replaced by warmth and you bask in it like a silent sigh. I asked her to have lunch with me in the courtyard the next day, and that weekend we went to a Sweet 16 dance for a friend together. We danced all night and after the after party at 'Nathan's' house I drove her home and it started to rain and she got out of the car and I jumped out and followed her and we got soaked. She was laughing and stood on the stoop to her side door by the driveway and the overhand was only big enough to keep one person dry. She opened her door and we heard her mom still awake so she closed the door for a second and turned back to me. 'Aren't you going to ever kiss me' she said. I didn't know why I had been so reluctant to do so and she leaned over, the rain falling on her head too, now, and her pouty lips met mine and our tongues danced for five minutes and she pulled away and said, 'you're a good kisser. we should have done this earlier', and laughed and jumped through her door and even though she was inside now I was frozen in the rain and stood there, the headlights from my car blasting on me in the dark of night in the pouring rain, smiling.

On Set with Nowhere To Go

Sitting on a set, watching your lines get butchered by amateur actors is almost as painful as getting a knife jabbed into your side, or so I assume. Last weekend I decided to let a friend of mine, 'Franklin', film a short movie I wrote a long time ago so he could pass a film class at USC. He wanted brilliant, I gave him intelligent, and he managed to convert that into insipid, incongruous, garbage. Apparently being a director/producer was simply his way of getting a certain girl on the casting couch and making her feel like a 'star' only to bed her at the wrap party when the shoot was done. We spent twelve hour days from Friday through Sunday, filming in a house in Bel Air where I tried to lounge by the pool and ignore when I was not needed, but the mispronunciation and 'improvisational' (if you can call it that) work of the actors echoed through the large empty house and almost made my ears bleed. My left ear still hurts. 'George' thinks its an earache, but I know what it is. . .butchering. The shoot tripped overitself countless times : mike's in shots, lighting errors resulting in grotesque shadows, actors forgetting lines over and over and over then making them up (AHHH!) and finally, to add to all this amateurish filmmaking, the PA they conned into helping out ended up rolling the steady cam mounted on a skate board into the jacuzzi. Cinelease will not be pleased. 'Franklin' was having a meltdown and we sat in a small gazebo away from everyone and smoked a joint while the crew took turns raining insults on the poor PA and I felt bad for him until I found out that he ended up fucking the girl 'Franklin' wanted the night before and that's why 'Franklin' was showing him no mercy. Good for him. As 'Franklin' and I sat under the trees and felt the warmth of a California Fall Sun cut through the branches and got very stoned off very good weed he asked me how everything was going. I proceeded to tell him about 'Beth' and he started laughing. 'Always the same shit, huh, _____'. I didn't know what he meant and he expanded : 'You meet a girl, you think you're in love, you fuck everyone else, you fuck this up, and then you're single for, like, a day, till you meet another girl.' He shook his head, laughed, and follwed this with 'I'd say 'lucky bastard', but after hearing this for seven years, I doubt I could envy you'. He rolled his eyes when someone pushed the PA in the pool and left me there so he could take control of what he called 'his set'. His words sent me through a series of flashbacks where I relived ever relationship I've had as of late. And he was right. Perhaps I did have a problem with commitment, or rather I committed too much too often to too many people. I picked up my phone on Sunday afternoon and called 'Erin'. She sweetly answered the phone and I told her it was over. Whenever she tried to argue back I'd say 'It's over'. She yelled at me for almost an hour while the PA was drying off and the last shot was being set up and I let her because maybe I felt I deserved it. Eventually she hung up in a huff and I called a locksmith, who came by the shoot, picked up my house keys, and went to my house where he changed the locks and returned at night with a new set of keys. What was so impressive about this was that 'Franklin' knew of a locksmith that worked on Sundays. I went home at around midnight and my house was empty and nobody was home and I realized that 'George' didn't have the keys to the house anymore and was supposed to come over after a wrap party for some play and I went out back and found him asleep in a lawn chair. I left him there, but left the back door open, and when I woke up the next day he was on the couch. Over the past few days I've recieved twelve angry messages from 'Erin', and I've turned my cell phone off because of them. She never came off psycho in any of the messages. It was almost pitiful, the tears behind the insults she tried to hurl at me. The last message she wasn't crying, wasn't angry, wasn't anything. She just said 'hi' and 'can we try to be friends'. 'Beth' came over last night and we watched STOKED, the movie about Gator the skateboarder (awesome) and this morning she is kissing my neck while I write this and she's going to work late and I feel unburdened for once. I'm thinking about giving 'Beth' a set of my house keys. . .but maybe not.

Lost at Home

Sunday morning 'Beth' wasn't there when I woke up and I find her swimming laps in my pool naked and we drink mimosa's and eventually I take her home and drive to the airport to pick up 'Erin'. 'Erin' is standing at the American Airlines Arrivals gate and an old Persian guy won't stop taking his eyes off her and I don't blame her as she's wearing nothing but a small t-shirt and a very short white peasant skirt that shows off her long legs. She slides in my car, kissing me on the cheek and we tear up the coast to her new Apartment in Malibu. I had no idea she moved and she tells me that she's staying at 'a friend's' house and I don't know this friend but apparently HE is out of town for the week closing some type of investment deal in Europe and she keeps stressing that she's not sleeping with him and the view is so good that I'd sleep with him to stay here. We drink bloody Mary's and watch Football and she keeps touching my hair and I tell her to stop. She wants to know what's wrong and I want to tell her about 'Beth' and tell her about the great time I've been having and I want to tell her how I haven't missed her and I want to hurt her, but the part of me that consists only of lust can't help but hold back. I realize that my sexual urges are taking over and its hard not to with her smoldering stare and my heart seems to constantly skip a beat everytime our eyes meet and there must be something to this this but I don't know what and I pull myself up from the couch and tell her I have to leave. She looks at me and laughs, pulling me back on to the couch and starts kissing me and stradles me and undoes my belt and tells me that she's been waiting to fuck me on this guys four thousand dollar black leather couch and she slides me in her and pulls off her t shirt and slowly rides me while pulling my hair back and I look past her, out at the Pacific and it comes to me : how did I get so fucking lucky? After I finish she collapses on me and plays with my earlobes and my cell phone doesn't get any service here. Later I finally leave and 'Erin' kisses me again and tells me that next week we're going to some fashion party in some Loft Downtown and as I start my car I remember the house keys I need to get back from her but it's too late now. I go home and have two messages from 'Beth' and I call her and we go get a bite to eat at the World Cafe in Brentwood and I go to her house after and we watch television and fall asleep on each other on the couch and by the time I wake up it is 4am and I carry her to bed and leave, driving to my place. The past three days I've been trapped in my house all alone as I've been asked to do a rewrite on a horror spec, convert a short story into a short film for a friend, and finish the first draft of another horror treatment I've been laboring over for the past month. Mon/Tues/Wed go by so quick and my only companion has been a bottle of Jack Daniels and a Daily Variety and I have GOT to start reading some real news. The election is coming up and all of Hollywood is voting for Kerry and that makes me want to vote for Bush because eighty percent of the people I deal with are idiots, but If that's the reason I vote then I'm no better then the Jack Ass who votes for Kerry because he loves Bruce Springsteen or the Hick who votes for Bush because Tim McGraw said so. I need to educate myself on the issues. The Daily Variety isn't going to do that for me. Drew Carey came out and said that he's not going to vote because his vote doesn't count and that's probably not wise since his new sketch show starts soon and over sixty million people watched the debates who believed their votes count. I'm babbling. . .see, getting stuck at home can drive you nuts. I need to go out tonight. I need to see 'Beth'. I need to get my keys back from 'Erin'. I wish there was a way to do that without actually seeing her. That's when I open up a Maxim magazine. . .and there she is. This is going to be harder for my libido than my heart...

Everytime I Live

'Erin' left around noon and kissed my cheek and said that she was glad that we got to spend time together and I ask her for my keys back. There is an awkward silence as she stares at me, questioningly, then she laughs and jumps in her A4 and pulls away and blows me a kiss and I'm standing outside in my boxers with my hand out waiting for the keys that are slowly pulling away from the Hills in 'Erin's purse. Later that night I pick 'Beth' up and we go to Brennen's to watch little turtles race for the outside of a ring where a fat man whose accomplished very little goads women to bend over as they place the turtles in the center of the ring. 'Beth' wants no part of touching the turtles and I want no part of her getting salivated on by drooling men so we sit inside and drink gin and tonics and listen to a cover band play 'Sweet Home Alabama' and my college friends meet up with us and they are impressed with her and she kisses me on the lips every few minutes as she gets slightly drunker. We try to dance and my friends tell me that she is very cool and I can't help but agree and Beth and I return to my place and for a moment I'm afraid 'Erin' will be there but she isn't and I lock the chain bolt which I never use otherwise. Me and Beth jump in my pool, fully clothed, and I open a bottle of champagne and we kiss and she says she's going to take a sick day tommorrow and we finish the bottle and fall into bed and explore each other for hours. She still won't let me have sex but I'm not stressing because I'm getting lost in her long tan legs and tight stomach and Thursday night blends into Friday and we spend the day in bed playing with each other and 'Erin' calls seven times and I turn off my cell phone. Friday I have a party at my place and 'Beth' invites her friends and I invite my guy friends and 'George' is being discreet with the coke, thank god, because I'm not sure how 'Beth' will take it. We dance all night and drink and more people I don't know show up and we all sing Poison's "something to Believe in" while we can still stand and eventually Beth and I fall back into my bedroom and 'George' winks at me and tells me he'll take care of the place cause he'll be up all night and me and Beth finally have sex and she tells me she wants it and being inside her is amazing and it could have been romantic but I think its just perfect. . .her body on top of mine, us kissing as I slide in and out of her and all our friends outside singing 'Every Rose has a Thorn' and 'Fly to the Angels' and 'I Won't Forget you, Baby'. After we're done she says 'thank you' and kisses me forever and our eyes close and we fall alseep to a serenade of 'Patience'. We wake up Saturday and 'George' is making omelettes and looks like he's been up all night with 'Kelley' a very skinny, very attractive friend of 'Beth's' whose been up all night with him and 'George' pulls me aside and tells me he's been talking to her all night and 'really likes her' and this could mean anything with him in the state he's in right now but 'Kelley' is talking to 'Beth' and they whisper and giggle like we're in 6th grade all over again. People start pulling themselves off couches and lawn chairs outside and we eat and 'Nick' makes bloody Mary's and 'Darryl' suddenly walks in, saying he went over to some girl's place, and knew we'd be up and the party starts again and we watch college football and my eyes constantly touch 'Beth's and I know that tonight I have to do something about 'Erin' so I call her when I get away for a second and 'Erin' is in New York on a shoot and says 'miss me?' and I have no answer. I tell her I'll pick her up at the airport Sunday. That night a girl who was promoted to Agent has a party and we go and drink too many Jack and Cokes and Beth and I go home early because we're so tired and my place is a mess and smells like vodka tonic and we ignore it and fall back into bed and she asks me to 'go slow' and when I'm finally inside her again her moans drive me wild and I have to focus so much on not exploding and she realizes this and pulls my hair back, which is getting longer, and says to just go and I do and we collapse on each other covered in sweat and this time I say 'thank you' before we fall asleep on Saturday night...