I Sent My Only Child To Live In Vegas Because My Apartment Was Too Crowded

I've showcased a lot of my Teeshirters on this blog and have loved them all because you guys are really creative. I keep saying I'm going to post them all and let people vote on their favorites but I'd have to make one of those Brady Bunch slash Hollywood Squares graphics and put pictures in them and oh my God I'm exhausted just typing it.

Here's another Teeshirter currently riding my sidebar:

When I was moving a year ago, I realized I had too much stuff and had no idea where it all came from because I certainly had nothing to do with it. As I slowly began packing in the months leading up to the move I knew there would have to be casualties. And one of them was this.

I posted a picture of him and my old friend Chandler said it reminded him of the one he had when he was a child. I wrote back and asked if I could send it to him and he said yes.

I had one condition, that he had to take a photo of him wearing my tee shirt and send it to me. THAT WAS A YEAR AGO.

I just received the picture last week.

I've known Chandler since 1999. We were both members of a Usenet message board for standup comics. Blogs are not nearly as entertaining as Usenet was. Bloggers play it safe. Never rocking the boat hard enough to lose an oar. But on Usenet? HOLD ON TO YOUR VAGINAS, PEOPLE.

When Usenet discontinued message boards because blogs were getting so popular, (oy) most of us reluctantly moved on. I went on to screenwriting and so did Chandler. Eventually he moved to Las Vegas and got a Master's Degree in Thanking Sweet Jesus He Left L.A.

Why is the bear wearing a shirt with Teddy Soro on it? Because when I was a kid I'd named him Teddy when I got him for Christmas one year. Apparently my imagination got lost when I checked out of my mother's uterus. You know how you always forget something when you're in a hurry.

Chandler made the shirt for Teddy. And artfully arranged my shirt behind the bear. See? Creative, every last one of you.

Is it just me or does it look like Teddy put on some weight?

First, Do No Harm

That's part of a doctor's oath, to First, do no harm. I only wish lawyers, teachers, mechanics, dear God especially mechanics, Congress, wedding ceremonies and all contracts began with that simple phrase.

People might think before they act.

Which brings me to where I now live:


This picture is the western sunset captured off my balcony. In my other apartment, I had no view. One side of it looked out on the building's swimming pool and the other side overlooked a big Hollywood Hills street, Gower. Gower reaches up into the hills on its way to the Hollywood sign and winds crazily around homes and yards. But when it passed the back of my old building, it carried only cars or ambulances and during the summer, many, many tour buses. Many.

The street is so noisy that many people complained they couldn't sleep. One girl never got used to the noise and slept in her living room. She now lives elsewhere.

So now I'm in an apartment with a spectacular view. This is the southern scene from my living room window. Far in the distance I can see the red blinking lights of the LAX towers and planes coming in for a landing.


On some nights I'm lucky enough to catch the full moon.


Had my old landlords been required to put First, do no harm in their lease, I would not be in this new building. A better building, with a laundry and trash chute on each floor, an elevator and security underground parking. I would not have a built-in air conditioner or all new appliances. When I stand by my refrigerator I look down on a rooftop swallowed by pink Bougainvillea and cypress trees crawling with purple Morning Glory.

And the best part of this entire story? MY OLD LANDLORDS HAVE 3 VACANCIES IN MY OLD BUILDING AND CAN'T RENT THEM. Having not noticed that every Hollywood neighborhood was littered with For Rent signs, they jacked the rents of their pitiful one bedrooms to over $1300. One has been vacant since June 1, mine has been vacant since July 1 and another since September 1.

It's called Karma.

When your intention in life is to purposefully harm another, karma will visit you.

Motherfuckers.

Earthquakes And Rough Sex

This is the living room in my old apartment. You can't see the 20 year old carpet that the landlords refused to change, or the cracks in the walls from all the earthquakes and or rough sex I had.


This is the living room in my new apartment:

 I'm praying for an earthquake and or rough sex to get this shit TOGETHER.

(click on pictures to enlarge)

I'm Trying Not To Throw Myself Off The Balcony

Because once in Niagara Falls, another comic and I were walking across a bridge with a huge drop and he turned to me and said, "Do you ever think about jumping off a bridge when you walk over one?"

I hadn't but I figured if this comic was that crazy then I'd better agree with him in case his second question was going to be, "Do you ever think about throwing someone off a bridge when you walk over one with them?"

There's a name for this phenomenon but I can't remember what it is. It's the uncontrollable, unconscious desire to hurl yourself into an abyss. It should be called 'You Need A Psychiatrist And Don't Forget To Take The Meds They Give You Because You Have A Death Wish.' My comic friend then said, "Sometimes I want to throw my wallet in, just to satisfy the need not to jump."

Let's not get crazy, buddy. Back then I had a Gucci wallet.

Another comic friend had a sister who committed suicide by getting into a barrel and rolling off the American side of Niagara Falls. I was horrified and asked my girlfriend the obvious question, "Where on earth did she get a barrel?"

Surely they don't SELL them at the Falls. Maybe on the Canadian side. I've noticed that all the American draft dodgers who escape to Canada are never seen again. EXACTLY.

Admit the dizzying photo below makes you want to jump off this blog:

P.S. Did she bring the barrel with her?
P.P.S. These are legitimate questions that people should offer the explanation to without me having to ask. Instead of being all That's Personal and It's None Of Your Business.
P.P.S. Sheesh.

The Mystery Of The Two Windows

While I was looking for apartments, I kept getting a picture in my head of a window at the end of a kitchen. And a picture window in the living room next to it. I had no idea why or what it meant. I would see apartments all day long and come home and have that vision pop into my head at random times. I wondered if it was going to be in a house I would own. (Even though I've never in my life wanted to own a house.)

I continued to look for apartments and then one day saw one I really liked. The manager left to get me an application and while he was gone I looked out the kitchen window. Then rocked to the side and saw this:


It was the EXACT picture that had appeared in my head, the kitchen window on the right, the living room picture window on the left.

Sidebar: The first dog my sister and I owned was an AKC dog named Fago Marigold's Mental Image. We had picked out a puppy but the breeder said, "You're not puppy people." Our dog, eventually named Kiko, was 9 months when we got him and we nearly cut off his balls by accident so we were probably not "9 month old dog people" either.

I had another apartment to see that day and it was also terrific. The manager gave me an application and said he would need to see my bank statements or a tax return. I didn't carry those around with me - obviously - so said I would return in a few hours. But I had a feeling the universe was trying to save me another application fee by putting this snag in the transaction. I knew in my heart I was supposed to have the first apartment. That's what the vision of the Two Windows was all about.

When I got home, the first apartment manager had already called and told me I got it. (He said when he saw my credit score he had to get me into the building) (It must have been high) (Or maybe he was?)

Remember the story of the Nic Cage movie and the angel played by Don Cheadle and how he told Nic the answer would come to him, and then my phone rang and it was from the town my Dad died in? I knew that was a message. The answer would come to me. And I knew it was my Dad "calling" to let me know it was a message. He and I believed in the metaphysical much more than the reality most people hang onto. Our way is more comforting but requires more faith. Although sometimes I run a quart low on that.

This is the view from my living room window.

This is the view from my 3rd floor balcony. In back of the pink house, those pale ash colored buildings, Paramount Pictures, are three blocks from my apartment.

I had so much extra stuff I was able to furnish my balcony.

Which is really ridiculous. I'm only showing one half of it because if I show you the other end, also furnished and decorated, you're going to call Hoarders on me.

I've Either Got My Mouth Open Or My Eyes Shut

This is my Dad's mother and me at their home in Illinois. My grandmother was probably thinking "Doesn't this child ever shut up?" 

And no, I never shut up.



As you can see I was made for a life in show business because when the camera is on me, I close my eyes. I love this picture of me and my Dad because it shows I was a fashionista even when I was a little girl.

Another Ridiculous Thing I Did For A Guy

Going through the two million things I own and have to pack has rocketed me back to some memories that make me groan. For example, the disappearance of Book Four in the Basic Reader series of children's books that belonged to my father's family.

It happened while I was living in NY and dating The Doctor. When we met I had just moved to NY from Paris and was on Food Stamps. He thought that was hilarious. The girl from Paris was on Food Stamps.

I kept the books on a table in my living room and one night he saw them and said he had them in his family too. They brought back so many memories for him. He was elated to see them again.

That cliche about what do you get someone who has everything really applied to The Doctor.

I mean, the guy had his own plane.

Sidebar: He once flew me back from New Orleans during a storm while I drank Jack Daniels straight from the bottle in the back of the plane. I was drinking the Jack not because I was afraid of the storm, I was eventually too shitfaced to be scared, but because I overheard him tell the copilot that not only was I a girlfriend BUT YOU SHOULD SEE THE PICTURE OF HIS OTHER GIRLFRIEND.

He also had a chauffeured stretch Mercedes and a 10 room apartment on Park Avenue. His shirts were all bespoke, his shoes and belts were always Gucci and he favored Armani.

So for his birthday I gave him Book Four.  I thought I'd come up with the perfect gift for him. And I was right. He loved it. Gushed over my thoughtfulness, my generosity, my creativity.

The Doctor and I went out for three years. After we broke up BECAUSE SOMEONE COULDN'T STOP CHEATING ON ME, we remained friends and a year or so later I asked him whether he still had Book Four.

"Book Four of what?"
"The books that were in your family, my family, you know, those children's books."
"Sorry, no idea what you're talking about."

That was a frequent theme in our relationship.

The Apartment I Shared With Mick Jagger

While packing up my current apartment I came across a picture that reminded me of my first apartment.

I was desperate and crashing with my friend Henry, who lived in Berkeley. He woke up one night and found me sitting at a desk naked, playing solitaire. The actual solitaire, with playing cards. I'd forgotten he lived there. So he drove me into San Francisco and I found a place on Ellis Street, below Polk.

The apartment was a furnished studio, on the ground floor. $110. a month. A stone cold drunk lived on one side of me and often knocked on my door in the middle of the night so he could crawl through one of my windows out to the fire escape and into his own apartment. Upstairs were a bunch of transvestites who used to push Seconals under my door so I could sleep at night.

I had this giant poster of Mick Jagger on my wall.  My friend Albert, a guy I went to school with in Paris and also a friend of Henry's, was visiting the States one year and took this picture. I used to keep the photo in a frame and every single person who saw it thought it was really me talking to Mick. The fact that he's on a stage singing and I'm standing in front of hanging beads didn't register with anyone. Also? That whole two dimensional thing.
I remember my shirt. It was black and had tiny red and black sparkles on it. I'm loaded down with all my Indian jewelry and wearing a hand-tooled belt I bought in Corsica.

Now I can't fit into that belt unless I wear it as a thigh tourniquet. Which could totally happen if someone happened to sever my femoral artery by accident and the belt was lying nearby.

This was the apartment I left after I found the heroin addict in bed with my gay hairdresser Eugene.

I abandoned my Calvin Klein sheets and the forest green hanging beads. And Mick Jagger.

The landlord was upset I was leaving. He offered to lower my rent to $100 because he said I was the best tenant he'd ever had.

I'm pretty sure I was, too.

My Mother Still Talks To Me Like This

As I pack furiously, I pick through the millions of memories lining the walls and cabinets of this apartment. I've stopped to re-read some journals, a habit I picked up last summer. Inside each one is a lost treasure from my past. Faded, pressed roses from a Dominican boy named Frankie who I was absolutely nuts about, snapshots that I hadn't deemed worthy of a photo album, business cards, invites to weddings and parties. A ticket stub to see Raquel Welch in concert.

All rammed inside pages and pages of the torment that is a journal. It took me years to figure out that the reason all my journals read like Dostoevsky was because I never wrote in them when I was happy.

One of the treasures I found was this typewritten letter to my father. It's faded and yellowed and after folding and unfolding, it's ripped across the middle. I discovered it in my father's belongings after he died. He'd kept every letter, every card that both my sister and I sent him over the years. This one jumped out at me and I brought it home 10 years ago and stuffed it in an old journal from the time I moved to Paris. I had left San Francisco after a very failed love affair with a man who turned out to be a heroin addict and who I found spooning in bed with my gay male hairdresser slash good friend Eugene.

This is a letter I wrote my father soon after I arrived.
This excerpt sums up the relationship I've had with my mother my entire life.

 ("...living with mom is just not possible. from the moment i arrived she has found things wrong with me. my eyebrows are too thin, i am too thin, i use too much toilet paper...")

Yes, I know that's funny. Thanks for enjoying my pain.

Here's a photo from the cruise to the Bahamas that my Dad took me on when I left San Francisco, to get my mind off the Being Dumped By A Heroin Addict Who's Really Gay thing. I arrived in Paris looking like this. Minus the cruise ship.

I was anorexic. On my right arm is a silver bracelet that I wore over my elbow. For those of you unfamiliar with bracelet etiquette, below the elbow is where most people wear them. 

And look, I'm smoking a cigarette!! Marlboros, in the red box. 

I would kill to still have those sunglasses. KILL KILL KILL. The purse is an old lady cloth one that I found in a thrift store. It's hilarious that after all these years my shopping habits haven't changed a bit. I still covet the things that others have tossed aside. The Greek cross around my neck was lent to my sister, who gave it to one of her boyfriends. She had brought it back from a trip to Mykonos, Greece and gave it to me as a gift. Years later, as an act of contrition, she got me another one on a trip to Cabo, but it was all shiny and silver and small AND NOT FROM GREECE.

Girls are dumb.

I still use too much toilet paper.

End of chat.

I'm Not A Beige Person

I keep my remote controls in this old truck. My friend Ann Abeyta was with me and she talked the guy into letting me have it for 8 dollars. He wanted 10. I would have paid 20.


I keep my takeout menus in this. If I leave Los Angeles I have to move to a city with restaurants that deliver or I'll starve to death.

I found this architectual drawing of the Paris Opera by Andras Kaldor at a Salvation Army here in LA. It was 10 dollars! I was with mom when I bought it and she thought it was "horrrrrrrrrrrrible" so of course I HAD TO HAVE IT. Two years later I caught her ogling it and she said, "eeet's really beyutifool, eeznt eeet?" And no, schizophrenia doesn't run in our family. Even though we have plenty of candidates for it.

I found this thingamajig, underneath the drawing, at a thrift shop. I have no idea what it is but it was perfect for my spices. It reminds me of how I went through Alegbra 2. What the hell is this?

This is a table pinball game I found in a vintage store in Santa Barbara. So of course I hung it on a wall.

This is the same table pinball game in my living room. I inherited the two watercolors underneath it. The middle one was done by Tom Street, a Florida artist who got cancer and killed himself.

The one underneath it was from our house in Washington D.C. Meanwhile, my mom, Dad and I were all afraid of water. We like to look at it the way it should be looked at, on a wall.

I buy anything with Paris written on it.

I got this Japanese pillow off EBay. It was made in the 1950's. I entertained the troops in Tokyo and love Sapporo. I can always come up with a reason why I have to have something. Beer is as good as any.

I bought this sign in St. Petersburg, after my Dad died. Emails and texting can never replace a phone call. I feel sorry for the future.

This clock is from the legendary Pasadena Flea Market. It was made in China, when Mao was putting his picture on anything. There were only 4 of them and this one was in pristine shape. The Hollywood Bowl wanted to borrow it as a metronome but said I could keep it in my house because they could hear it from there.

And now it's all going into boxes. To be unpacked on.......

L.A. Sign Of The Times #84

I got this guy when I was a kid. I named him Teddy because I apparently had no imagination.

I've dragged him from Washington D.C. to New York to L.A.

I'm not a stuffed animal person but I can't seem to emotionally unload Teddy the Badly Named Stuffed Bear. Does anyone else keep a stuffed animal from their childhood?

And what does your shrink say about that?

L.A. Sign Of The Times #83

Seriously, who bought all this crap?

L.A. Sign Of The Times #82

This is a lot less fun that it looks.

And the moving away from hell begins...

Sometimes My Brain Is On Pause

Saturday I was lying on my couch waiting to die, waiting for the Velocirapture to swallow me whole. And watching a movie called The Family Man starring Nicolas Cage and Tea Leoni. I spent most of the movie trying to keep track of Nicolas Cage's hairpieces. He had more styles and colors than a 25 year fast-forwarded clip show of Oprah's hair.

There's a moment in the movie when Cage and Don Cheadle, who plays an angel, are in a car and Cage is confused about what's happening to him. Cheadle tells him he has to figure it out. Cage asks him why he just can't tell him what's going on but Cheadle persists. "Let it come to you. It will come to you."

This is how my life has run its course. The Answer always comes to me. It pops into my head and I instantly "Know" it's the right thing to do.

Sidebar: This offer not valid with boyfriends.

It happened in Paris, it happened in New York. Both times I was miserable but then I heard The Answer and off I went. But as unhappy as I've been living at my present address here in LA, I haven't heard The Answer. That calm inner voice of The Higher Self. The voice telling me what to do, where to go. It once told me the password of someone's email account. It often gives me the result of someone else's problem. I depend on it so much that it writes the majority of my punchlines. It's never been wrong.

Sidebar Again: This offer still not valid with boyfriends. I repeat this for my own benefit.

But lately I've been obsessing about The Answer. Where is it? WHERE IS IT? And then I take a breath or seven and remember that all the other times it came to me, I didn't expect it. It just showed up.

So I'm watching Don Cheadle, one of my top 5 favorite actors ever, tell Nic Cage that the answer WILL COME. It will come, he repeats. And as much as I've been fixated over this very issue, I knew it was a message I was meant to hear as messages appear in many forms. Movies, a chance encounter, a phone call. We've all read The Celestine Prophecy, correct?

Then my phone rang.

I looked at the caller ID.

Area code from St. Petersburg, Florida. The town my father died in. The caller hung up immediately, didn't leave a message. But they didn't need to.

I heard it loud and clear.

I spent Sunday with my sister. I told her the story and at the end of it she burst into tears. "That was Dad helping you out."

Yes, I know. So, thanks Dad.