STAGGERING AROUND THE CROSSROADS

Anyone Can Be Molly Ringwald

You gotta walk your walk to be who you be

I have a choice. I can write or I can shop at the Goodwill. Seems like an easy decision, right? Sometimes it is, but other times, there’s a moldy sweater hanging on a bent wire hanger in the smudgy Goodwill window.

It catches my eye like a disco ball on John Travolta’s dance floor and I think, “Bay-bee! You can have my Mark Twain Award!’

I can’t do both. When I shop at the Goodwill, my writing leaks out of my brain matter like a drunk on a stool who just visited Mar-Lago and has a Kim Jong-il letter to read.

Robert Johnson knew all about my crossroads. He met the devil and made a deal. Music for his soul. My devil is at the Goodwill. It’s a dusty mid-century modern egg chair that represents an upper-middle-class, eclectic, casual chic, living room arrangement.

I am drawn to its message of afternoon cocktails, half-ass parenting, post-lunch adultery, and smoking on airplanes. It’s my oasis and worth my time in the down-under and I’m not talking to you Aussies — unless you’re cloven-footed.

Another thing I traded my writing soul in for, at the Goodwill, is a cashmere XXL men's floor-length coat that makes me feel like Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club.

I never wanted to be Molly Ringwald. Anyone can put lipstick on with her tits if she’s wearing the right bra and she doesn’t have frozen shoulder. But Judd Nelson. That’s who I wanted to be. Diamond earring.

Good writing isn’t supposed to be traded in for a cheap thrill, such as feeling like Judd Nelson, but a cheap thrill might inspire writing — like schtupping Judd Nelson.

Productive writers isolate and soak inside their tragic sad-baths, holding back their glory until their work is complete. Sometimes the work is never complete and that keeps us on a steady diet of woe is me.

But sometimes we writers prematurely extrapolate, telling our story too soon because we are tired of being alone with it. Our story feels real enough to share with a passer-by, a lover, a barista, or a party quest.

The challenge we writers face is though we are colorful on paper, we aren’t always interesting IRL. Some of you are, I know. I see you, living your lives, climbing your mountains, saving your turtles, and screwing your neighbors. And I say well done, ma’m.

But many of us sit alone in our rooms, making shit up, enhancing ourselves by creating fictions around our banal core story. Sometimes we are forced to embellish because people don’t want to read about our navels.

That’s half true. Some of you poets, you know who you are, I could read about your navels for a week on the coast, pausing on every word as if I were sucking out pomegranate seeds, but even you are sitting at your tables alone, like the rest of us. Dull and bioluminescent simultaneously.

Often, we writers are short on travel funds and have very few adventures to share — other than what happened at Costco or how crazy our relatives are.

So, when we attend dinner parties and people with high paying jobs are going on about the Cinque Terre and Bora Bora, we are forced to share the only thing interesting about us — what current story we are working on.

That happened to me once. I explained an entire book I was writing on to a poor woman at a party. As I spoke, I felt the book leaving me like a lover I had been hiding and suddenly outed. And my book was like, Bitch, I’m married. We were supposed to be a secret.

By the time I got home, my book was gone. Packed up and shacked up with some writer who didn’t whore out her private life for public consumption.

Not only did I lose my book and bore the shit out of an innocent party guest. I think I ended a marriage. Not mine. My husband already knew I was nuts. But, I heard the captive party guest left her husband the next day — not kidding.

Did my book make her give up on her marriage? I always wondered, but how could I ask? Was there something in my story that made her hate her lifetime lover? Was my story that powerful? That malignant? That swaying? I could only dream. It didn’t matter. My book was gone. Her man was out to pasture.

Why do we self-sabotage?

This brings me full circle to the Goodwill and my writing conundrum. I can write or I can buy a scratched Elvis album. That’s what was offered to me at my crossroads. Today I pick writing.

Tomorrow, who knows? Maybe I’ll call that lady and ask her if I fucked up her marriage. That could be an interesting story the next time some schmuck invites me to a party.

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