Don’t Bother Trying This

It never did work and still won’t

By the time anyone’s made it past their 30th birthday, they’ve already lived several different incarnations. Ten years ago I was not the woman I am today and double that for twenty years ago.

And forty years ago? Who was that poor, confused kid who thought she was so ugly, so broken and messed up that no one could possibly love her? I look at photos taken when I was 21 years old and I was a BABE!

How could I not have seen that?

The Problem

So I was not quite 20 years old and had made my escape from the little white bread, mayonnaise, and cream of mushroom soup town where I’d grown up. I had always known I’d never be at home in that place.

I was living large in Cleveland, Ohio. Working in housekeeping at a Catholic nursing home (I can still recite Hail Mary, Full of Grace, Blessed art Thou among Women………which was broadcast over the loudspeakers at mealtimes). Stopping off for “one quick drink” night after night, closing the bar and then going through the agony of a 5 am alarm shrieking that it was time to get the hell up and get to work.

I had come to the city with dreams and a pretty big opinion of my abilities as an artist and painter. I had plans. But things weren’t working out the way I’d expected. And the novelty of the big city was wearing off pretty quickly. Ok, yes, painting my first mural on the wall of the bar I kind of lived in for years was a thrill. I didn’t get paid but I drank for free while I worked on it. Ask me how long it took to finish that masterpiece.

The Solution

Then my lucky break: the chance to throw everything into the car and move to San Diego! I left behind dirty dishes in the sink as well as everything that wouldn’t fit into the car. With the carelessness of the young and selfish, I left it for someone else to clean up.

In the weeks between making the decision to move and actually pulling out of the parking lot, I experienced an unexpected and intense level of relief. Finally, I would be able to begin really living my life. I daydreamed about palm trees and wide-open vistas. The terrible grinding drudgery and pointlessness of my life eased. I finished the damned mural.

Everything east of the Mississippi was kind of what I was used to but after passing the St. Louis Arch, things began to get interesting. Well, I guess you could call it interesting when everyone in the truck stop in Oklahoma stopped eating to stare (out of state plates gave me away as not being from around these parts).

There was that night when I woke up in the back seat of the car in New Mexico and was equally enthralled and terrified by the night sky. I had never seen so many stars. It was as if the entire sky from horizon to horizon was encrusted with stars. And they were pulsing. I shrank down as far as I could because it felt like that shimmering blanket of stars was lowering towards me.

Every mile that brought me closer to California heightened my excitement. California! I could barely breathe, coming down through the suburbs and into San Diego. In the flurry of arriving, getting an apartment, and finding work I lost sight of that promised land; the place where everything would be right at last.

The Reality

But right from the first night (when someone’s drunk and pissed off cousin put a rock through my living room window), something wasn’t right. Ok, yes, the business with the rock wasn’t good.

But it was something else, something I couldn’t quite name.

I started work at a big fancy resort hotel out by the ocean, taking three buses out and three more back every day. I’d come home, worn out but at loose ends. I took to hanging out on the low concrete planter holding stunted palm trees by the local liquor store. I’d buy a pint of vodka, some grapefruit juice and the guy in the store would keep me in ice. I’d sit out there for hours, drawing crazy stuff, writing overwrought poetry and “selling” my work for a buck or two, sometimes for a bag of pot.

Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd. I’d start off with one or two people coming out of the liquor store stopping to watch the weird shit I was drawing. Then someone would see them and come over. It became a kind of performance art. One night a drunk at the edge of the crowd threw her head back and howled “Oscar Wilde is alive and living on El Cajon Blvd”!

I had arrived.

It took about a month for the real problem to dawn on me. By this time I had struck up a “friendship” with the crystal meth dealer down the alley and had fallen into the routine of drawing outside the liquor store after work until it closed at 11 pm, then finishing the night down the alley, snorting crank (which is what we called crystal meth then), smoking premium grade hash, drawing like a fiend until my hand cramped and then trundling off to grab an hour’s sleep at first light before shoving myself to work cleaning hotel rooms all day.

The Epiphany

Here’s what was wrong (besides the obvious lack of sleep):

To my utter astonishment when I got to San Diego, I discovered I had brought me with me. Somehow, without ever really putting that together, I’d genuinely believed I could leave me behind in Cleveland and all my problems would be solved.

I held out for another two months living like this. At one point, I gathered up a pile of those weird drawings and went for a jurying session at a local art co-op. There were about seven of us and after each presented their work, we gathered out in the parking lot. The ferocious heat of the day had eased and it was that magical time of day. There were the palm trees. The sky was a mild purple pink and the mist was beginning to come in from the ocean. Here was maybe my big opportunity. I felt empty and confused.

I was accepted into the co-op. Cue the swelling string section and get ready for the happy ending.

Then What Happened?

It all fell apart and three days later I was on the red-eye back to Cleveland. Ugly stuff from the past reached across the continent and I left behind everything I owned including the car that got me to California and died.

Sitting numbly as the sun slid up over the fantastical landscape of clouds beneath the plane, the beauty of what I was seeing registered. Dimly. Spires of clouds rose from the milky white plain of clouds and blazed into pink-red glory as the sun rose.

The plane lowered and we were getting closer and closer to that Technicolor dream. Closer. Closer. It felt like we would touch down at any second. Then we sank into the whiteness. The world disappeared. As the white went to gray and the gray began to shred, there was Cleveland. It was a cold, dark morning under the clouds and I was back where I’d started only a few months earlier.

I had been so sure that going to California was the answer. Being so wrong about that, I landed back in Cleveland without a clue as to what the answer could be. I didn’t even know the question.

Somehow, I managed to get my old $100 a month apartment back (with a ceiling that now leaked when it rained) and began cleaning rooms at the Ramada Inn out by the airport.

I fell in with the old crowd and, the boy was they glad to see I hadn’t made a go of it out west. The bar got sold, the new owner tore out my mural but then bought another place where I started work on two more murals.

I became the mural painter of the upgraded downtown Cleveland skyline which now boasted three skyscrapers. In fact, when I went back in 2016, my 60-foot mural of the Cleveland skyline was still on the wall of the Tick Tock Tavern on Clinton Blvd on the west side.

It took me another fifteen years to begin to fathom what the problem was (even though it was staring me right in the face every time I looked into a mirror) and then to inch towards a solution.

And the solution wasn’t to go live in another city, state, or country. Although I managed a half-hearted, full-on-drunk attempt to emigrate to Australia because I’m a Plan A woman. If Plan A doesn’t work, I go for Plan A.

The problem was me all along.

What It’s Like Now

The solution is and always has been love and service.

Be there for others. Do the dishes. Don’t leave messes for others to clean up. Make the bed. Ask for help and then accept it. Don’t lie. Do my work well. Look at what I have instead of what I want. Knowing that how I feel is not how I am. Sit quietly. Be uncomfortable without having to fix it.

Don’t steal friends’ spare change. Ask how you are and then listen, not simply wait to tell you how I am. Walk more. Don’t shoplift. Go to the dentist twice a year. Answer the phone. Pay my bills on time or early. Apologize when I’m wrong and then don’t do that again. Make amends for the shit I did in the past. And don’t do those things anymore, either.

Not getting drunk every night helped.

When the opportunity came for me to move to New York City in 2000, I approached it with real caution. I didn’t jump. I ran it past people I trusted. With no small amount of trepidation, I asked Lee Powell, one of my dearest and most honest friends, what she thought of this mad scheme of mine to transfer to Columbia University and study writing. I was ready for her to shoot the whole mad notion down.

“Good. You’re ready.”

She was right. This was not an attempt to fix my life by running away from anything. Instead, I took it step-by-step. When I left my apartment on Lake Avenue in December 2000, it was as clean as I could leave it. I brought my 20-year-old cat with me. I stayed in touch with close friends in Cleveland and reached out to new ones in New York.

It took me eight and a half years and well over $93,000, but I earned my BA in Literature Writing in 2006; 30 years after graduating from high school.

Right now things might look a little dire to a less experienced eye. I’m back to being unemployed which is dicey when you’re 61 years old and wear half your hair buzzed off in a bleach-blonde crew cut. Medium looked promising for a minute there but it’s clear that I’ll need to just get a damned job. And I will.

And I still pay close attention to all those things I listed above. Nothing is guaranteed and nothing is permanent.

Today is magnificent.

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