When the Journey Began

I wrote this on October 1, 2008, but forgot to post it. Tomorrow I leave for my new life in LA. I had decided to move out there last summer, sight unseen. This is from my first trip out there to make sure that I was making the right decision.

I am sitting in the LAX airport, waiting to board my plane back to Boston. I feel certain about some things after coming here, which is why I came here. So there’s a sense of accomplishment. One is that LA is the right place for me. I know that I will be happy here; I can feel it. I had lunch with an old college acquaintance yesterday, and once we sat down, he looked at me and said, “You love LA, don’t you. I can tell. You look really happy.” It suits me.
At the moment, I am looking to my right, at three women, all with short white hair. Two out of three of them have strong Texas accents, and all three of them are talking on their cell phones. The one with the strongest accent is the loudest. She is probably about 80 years old, short and stout. LA is just a place where she is changing planes to someplace else. She keeps scrolling down her contacts list on her phone, and calls one person after another. Over her green polka-dot blouse, she is wearing a safari vest. She is excited to be back, excited to tell about her trip.
For my trip to LA, I booked a little villa in Los Feliz; it’s basically a beautiful apartment with a door code that is programmed to my visit. It was in a perfect neighborhood, exactly where I want to live. I walked to the grocery store every day, cooked myself meals in the kitchen, and did laundry, listened to music and drank cocktails on the patio. Had people over, figured out how to get places, found an acupuncturist and got my nails done. Made it my home.
I thought a lot about what this trip was going to be for me. I knew I was going to get a feel for LA, and to start making connections. I was going to go alone, and then I wasn’t, and ultimately I went without any kind of plan or agenda at all. I had a few loose ideas of people I was going to see at different points, but it was mostly open time. I had to keep reminding myself to use this as an actual vacation and an opportunity to rest. This was my first vacation since I separated, and just being in a new environment with time to myself each day, warm weather, and sunshine was enough to focus on. I didn’t need to add to my sense of duty, which is already heavy enough most of the time. I tend to think of myself as a failure if I spend a day doing nothing.
Somehow, an agenda slowly formed itself and I had all kinds of interesting experiences, connecting with people I didn’t know well, and walking away feeling like I have friends here. Feeling like I was meeting good, good people out here.
I think I was really surprised by how different it felt to be in this new city. The whole pace of things, the way people carry themselves, it feels very different from Boston. People are friendly, and nobody is ever in a hurry. No sense of urgency, even on the roads. Sometimes I found myself sitting in the car, clapping my hands and saying, “Ok, this is business, people. Come on. Let’s make it happen,” as though my unseen speech and motivational clapping would somehow unconsciously inspire the other drivers to pick up the pace.
One highlight of my trip was going to a small stand-up show that a friend, Steve, was hosting. It was in a dark little club called The Room, in Santa Monica. One of the comics took the stage, kind of an angry guy whose jokes really weren’t funny, because the level of bitterness was way too present. For example, if the punchline of a joke is, “I’m glad you were molested,” I’m not quite sure I’m totally on board with that. But this guy went up, and he started his whole bit with “I tend to be seen as pretty negative, but if you don’t like my act, you’re perfectly free to move to some totalitarian country where there isn’t free speech,” and then suddenly this woman calls out, “Yeah, like America!” And then starts shouting out things like “AmeriKKKa,” and stuff like that, and the comic tells her to shut up, although I can’t remember if he called her a cunt right away, or whether that came a bit later. So he got into it with her, and she wouldn’t stop, and then the guy who was with her got involved, after the comic said things like, “I don’t care if your dad gave you herpes, or whatever your problem is,” and called her a stupid bitch and whatnot, and then the two people were yelling things back, sort of dumb and drunk things. However, they were pointing out the irony of the comic railing on about free speech, but then telling them to shut up. At first, it seemed like a bit, or part of an act, because the lines seemed so contrived. So everyone was sort of sitting and awkwardly looking back and forth between the comic and the hecklers, and wondering what would happen next. Eventually, the comic explained that this was not, in fact, a bit, but it was actually happening. Everyone felt surprised and at a loss of what to do. Eventually Steve and another of the show’s hosts decided to ask the hecklers to leave, since they wouldn’t stop, and the comic was starting to threaten to get involved physically, which also would have been interesting, some kind of brawl, or knifing, maybe. But they got hustled out with some protests, and then the guy tried to shake hands in an “all is forgiven” gesture with the comic, but he refused.
I think the difficult part is that I have very carefully told myself that I don’t want to spend the next nine months feeling that I’m not present in the life I am living now. I don’t want to feel like I’m in some kind of waiting room, or purgatory, just waiting to make it out west. I didn’t think that traveling to LA would make me feel like that, because I am actually happy in Boston. But that is how I ended up feeling, like I couldn’t wait to move out here, and really felt like I didn’t want to come back to Boston. In my mind, I am trying to think of the next possible time I can return to California. It felt sad to leave. I did a lot of sighing.