I Made The Same Relationship Mistake as KiKi Walter

It wasn’t with the Lizard King, but our experiences were similar

“I am the Lizard King.”

The guy was standing up on a table late in the night, and Kiki Walter (the 23-year-old version of her), stared up at his brown hair cascading down his shoulders and his head held back embodying the late great Jim Morrison.

This opening line from Kiki Walter’s story, “The Time I Ran Away to Join the Circus,” grabbed my eyes because I’m a fan of the Lizard King-Jim Morrison.

But it was the next part of her story that sent me back down memory lane in my life to when I was twenty-two years old and young and extremely naive.

Yes. You are the Lizard King. And I will follow you anywhere.

He jumped down from the table with a big grin and his shining eyes.

“Kris. Come with me. Let’s leave tonight. Come with me to join Second City.”

“Yes, let’s do it.”

“After we finish pitcher, we’ll stop at my house and get my things.”

Second City is the improv comedy club in Chicago where Bill Murray, John Belushi, John Candy, Dan Akroyd, Gilda Radner, Tina Fey, Steve Carrell, and many others began their acting careers before appearing on the big screen.

So Kiki drove the Lizard King from New York to Chicago on December 24, 1993, instead of going to her mom and Stepdad’s house for Christmas Day, and it brought back into my memory a plane trip to see a girl when I was 22.

Have you made an impulsive relationship decision? Maybe, you have.

Kiki’s story reminded me of a call I got past midnight when from a girl I had met at a New Age type self-improvement conference who called me from Phoenix, Arizona, where she and two of her girlfriends went for the weekend.

She was drunk. That should have been a neon warning sign. But it wasn’t.

“Come to Arizona,” she slurred. “I waaannnttttt to see you.”

What guy in their early twenties wouldn’t be sucked in by that line?

We hadn’t even gone on a date. Maybe one, I don’t remember. But I packed a duffel bag immediately because, well, she was blond, cute, and into me.

I got a plane ticket, told my mom I was spending the night at a friend’s house and flew from Los Angeles to Arizona, where she met me at the airport.

I could tell right away by her reception that it wasn’t going to work out.

She’d sobered up and had a different view of me, I guess you could say, because she had a distant attitude for a guy who just flew out to see her.

Her friends’ attitude was similar. It was just like Kiki’s arrival in Chicago.

When Kiki and the Lizard King pulled into Chicago, she took the opportunity to ask Jim Morrison his plan for where they were going to stay while she filled up her gas tank of her 1983 Chevy Cavalier with her ex’s joint credit cards.

The plan had not been discussed while finishing the pitcher of margaritas.

“I know a guy,” I told you.

“Who?”

“He’s a friend. An actor.”

The guy said to look him up if he ever came into town.

“He doesn’t know you’re coming?”

It was at that moment she realized something.

She had been used by the Lizard King for a ride to Chicago.

I had a similar feeling while we drove in a jeep through the humid Arizona weather and while sitting in an air-conditioned theatre watching Mike Myers (who got his start at Second City in Chicago) in the movie Wayne’s World.

I was sitting in the jeep next to a girl who asked me to fly to Arizona to see her, and she was like a block of ice as the temperature soared around 100 degrees.

She was the same way in the theatre. This made it hard to laugh at the movie.

As I read Kiki’s story about her trip to Chicago with the Lizard Kind, I realized what her and my story have in common are the fantasies people have towards the opposite sex and the irrational thinking in relationships when they’re 23.

Kiki’s actor’s fantasy — which was identical to mine — was to live in a house with other starving actors (substitute writers for me) eating cans of beans.

And the Lizard King appealed to her as the epitome of that dream.

He didn’t care about material things. He was a guy who was incredibly well-read, intelligent, politically savvy, and he said he didn’t cave to “the man.”

I had a similar writing fantasy while driving a taxi cab in Los Angeles in my 20s. I wanted to write a book about the weird people I picked up, and there were quite a few Lizard King characters since I hung out with my passengers.

And drunk Vietnam vets. Musicians. Writers. Retired secretaries. Three guys I picked up from a bar who I jumped off the Manhattan Beach pier alongside. I kept having adventures and writing my book until I crashed my cab rushing to pick up my next passenger on a rainy, foggy morning while I was hung over.

Ironically, the girl who called me from Arizona wasn’t my type. Not artsy like my last girlfriend. However, she was cute, blond, and she wanted to see me.

That was enough for me in my fantasy idea of relationships at age 23, so I hopped on a plane with the same Joie de vivre Kiki did with the Lizard King.

I was down for an Arizona Adventure or, as it turned out, for a rude awaking, But the point of this story isn’t to throw cold water in the face of the young.

I am 52, and my Arizona trip was a long time ago and if I were to give advice to my much younger Millennials reading this, it isn’t what you’d expect me to say. I think it’s a good thing to make some mistakes in relationships and to learn whatever the lesson is we need to learn at every moment in our lives.

One moment leads to the next moment and we need to make mistakes from our experiences in relationships to carry with us to the next moment in life.

Mistakes are how we learn.

This is what I was trying to explain to my wife yesterday when I was filming my son making brownie cookies and he put too much avocado oil in them.

Actually, it was after the Avocado cookie-brownies came out of the over. And it was obvious from their appearance that too much oil had been poured in.

Plus, she had the video evidence on the I-Pad to see how much oil he used.

Mistakes are how we learn, I thought, as she scolded my son and me. But my wife eventually came to the same conclusion at the end of the movie Encanto.

The theme of the movie related beautifully to the Avocado brownie-cookies.

What I’m trying to say is I’d rather make a big mistake than letting fear hold me back from making rash and impulsive decisions like my trip to Arizona, and I bet Kiki probably has the same attitude about her Chicago adventure.

So be young and naive, rash and impulsive, in your decision-making in your relationships in your twenties, and learn from those mistakes you make or, maybe, some of your rash and impulsive decisions may have happy endings.

Who knows?

While reading Kiki’s story, I thought about how I learned something from my Arizona trip, but then a memory popped into my head to remind me I made a similar mistake in another short-term relationship that involved handcuffs.

Oh, well, that mistake led me to make a bigger change in my life that set me on the course my life has taken in the 30 years since those mistakes. So did, by the way, ending up the hospital after I crashed my taxi that foggy morning.

I don’t know if I’d call them mistakes. They feel more like life lessons.

Or the hand of God guiding me to go in one direction and not the other.

Riders on the storm Riders on the storm Into this house, we’re born Into this world, we’re thrown Like a dog without a bone An actor out on loan Riders on the storm

— Jim Morrison, “Riders on The Storm”

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