My Incredibly Wonderful, Miserable Life

by Adam Nimoy

  Jonah’s eleven now and he’s been playing drums since he was eight. I know a few songs on guitar. And every so often, at any given moment, he’ll come up to me and say, “Dad, can we play a song?”

  And if I have the time, I always say yes because it’s fun jamming with him.

  But today, he needs a new pair of drumsticks. He shows me his old pair and they’re all chewed up. I tell him the only drum shops open on Sunday are in Hollywood and that I’ll take him if he feeds the fish and cleans out the lizard’s cage.

  When he finishes the chores, I go inside to get ready and I tell him that we have to visit Sylvia and Orky after we get the drumsticks. He nods and says okay, like he’s totally willing to come with me to visit my eighty-four-year-old cousins.

  We drive to Guitar Center and park on a side street. And as we walk down Sunset Boulevard, on another picture-perfect day in L.A., I remind him that he’s probably one of the best eleven-year-old drummers in town, and the best part about that is that he’s in my band. He turns to me and says I’m one of the best forty-six-year-old guitar players in town, and the best part about that is that I’m in his band. That’s when I hold him and squeeze him and kiss him.

  At this point, we’ve been jamming together for almost four years, and so far we pretty much have the same taste in music.

  Basically, I’ve brainwashed him on ’60s and ’70s tunes. Then he found my copy of Nirvana’s Nevermind, and now our repertoire is full of Kurt compositions. But I’ve never taken him to Guitar Center because I know he’s going to want to buy everything in the place. And when we walk into the main display room, there are hundreds of guitars hanging on the walls from floor to ceiling. Jonah sees other guys playing the guitars and he insists I take one down for him. And of course he sounds great, even though he’s only recently started to play.

  Four guitars later and I have to tell him this is the last one. Finally, we walk upstairs to Drum Heaven, where they have about a dozen drum kits all set up with people banging away. Now I’m sorry I didn’t bring my earplugs. Jonah gets some sticks and starts playing on one drum set after another. And now that I hear him play on a full-sized kit, it confirms what I’ve known for a long time: This kid knows what he’s doing. He tells me he needs a new snare. I agree and tell him to start saving.

  I finally drag him off the drums and we buy a set of drumsticks, and we manage to get out of there having spent only $6.50. I take him to In-N-Out, his personal favorite, for a delicious, unhealthy burger, and then we stop at RadioShack for some telephone batteries.

  That’s when the trouble starts.

  They have this big display for remote-controlled cars and he starts in about how he needs one. I remind him he has four or five of these things at home, but he tells me they’re all broken. I say that I’ll check them out and see if I can fix them when we get home, but he becomes more insistent and upset because he can’t have a new one right now. We get back in the car, and now he’s really pissed off. I try to pet his head, but he won’t let me. And then I just leave him alone. I let him just sit there and think about it and cool down and live the experience. Oftentimes, I don’t want to live the experience. Oftentimes, when things get difficult, I don’t want to feel anything or deal with anything or experience anything. I just want to numb myself. That’s why I’m a pothead.

  That’s not the life I want for him.

  The real problem, Jonah tells me, is that he doesn’t want to go to Sylvia and Orky’s. Now, I know it’s hard to drag an eleven-year-old boy on a Sunday afternoon over to some old farts’ apartment. But it has to be done and he agreed to go with me. And I tell Jonah that Orky’s my oldest friend and we need to visit him because he won’t be around much longer. I remind him how much Orky’s been through in his life, how he lost his entire family in a fire when he was eight and the only reason he survived was because his father lay down on top of him.

  I stop talking as we drive down Jefferson Boulevard.

  Jonah calms down and goes along with it without a word. Soon enough, he lets me pet his head. And he’s very sweet while we’re visiting the old and gray and shrinking Sylvia and Orky, and they are so happy to see us, even for just a short time. When we leave, he feels good. I can tell he knows he did something very right.

  When we get home, we go into the garage that we’ve converted into a little studio. He gets behind his mini drum set with his new sticks. I put in my earplugs and pick up my guitar. Something comes into my head, a chord progression, and I start strumming fast and he starts drumming fast and he’s right there with me and pretty soon we’re wailing on something that sounds like surf-music-meets-punk-rock. He watches me and he picks up all the changes I throw at him and we get really tight on this as we wail away.

  That’s when I start thinking to myself: Nobody has what we have. Nobody. But that was last year.

  Tonight, Jonah’s angry that I’m not there anymore to put him to bed. He claims I promised I’d be around to put him to bed, and I explain that I can’t do it when his mom’s there. I tell him I can put him to bed at my place if he would just come over, that I miss doing that and that if he could just come over for the night sometime, I could put him to bed. But he keeps saying that’s never going to happen. And then Nancy, their mom and my ex, comes home because I’ve been hanging out with them for the evening while she was out. And I say good night to Jonah and tell him I love him.

  “I wish I could believe that,” he tells me.

  Then he says he’s mad at me because I won’t come home for him, that I don’t love him enough to come home. And it just kills me, but there’s nothing I can do now because Nancy’s home and I really need to go. Everything’s cordial between us although there are occasional flare-ups. We gave couples therapy one more shot after I moved out, but it just led to more yelling so we stopped going.

  I say good night to Maddy and I’m out the front door and lock the top lock from the outside. I get in my car and drive back to my apartment. I pull into my designated parking spot and just sit there.

  That’s the real beauty of being sober: You have nowhere to go, no place to escape to, and nowhere to hide. Instead, you get to feel the pain. You get to live the experience.

  SPACE-MAN/SPIDER-MAN

  IT’S MOTHER’S DAY 2001, three years before I would sober up and move out of my house. We’re taking my mother to brunch in Westwood. We’re going to the Moustache Café. Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves: my sister’s family, my family, and my mother. I bought my mom a turquoise bracelet, and my wife, Nancy, gave her one of her illustrations, which she had framed, and it looks really terrific. The card I give my mom is one of those flowery things, the kind with the fancy lettering that goes on and on about how she has always been there for me, how she’s always cared for me and supported me, how she’ll always be a very important part of my life. I hate these kinds of cards but she loves them and so every year I buy her one. This year, I can’t resist, so I sign it, “You’re adoring and loving son, Frank.” When she sees that, she laughs. Thank God she sees the humor. And she hands it to my sister and Nancy, who also get a kick out of it.

  Across the dining room, in the bar, the Lakers game is on TV. I try to watch it, but I can barely make out what’s going on though I know they’re behind. We finish the meal and the chocolate soufflés. My mother signs for the check and absolutely no one feels guilty about that. Then we all kiss and hug and leave.

  Nancy and the kids and I are driving back to the house when, on a whim, I decide to pass through my old neighborhood where we lived after we moved out of the house on Palms Boulevard. As we drive down Beverly Glen, I make a left on LaGrange. I always feel a chill when I come up to the top of LaGrange because that’s where I rode on the back of John Wall’s motor scooter in 1964, with the wind blowing in my face and a brand-new song playing in my head called “All My Loving.”

  We make a right on Comstock and drive down to my old house. It’s still the same. A pretty Spanish-style home, only now it has lot
s of trees and shade in front. It looks good. It feels good.

  I remember running up the steps to the front door: It was the mid ’60s and I had a TV Guide in my hand. I bought it at the Food Giant, now the Ralph’s, on Olympic Boulevard. I was so excited to show it to my mother and my sister because it had an ad for a new TV series about a cool-looking crew on a spaceship exploring the far reaches of the universe.

  I remember the bags of mail that started coming to our house on Comstock Avenue, the fan mail that started coming by truckloads in the spring of 1967 after 16 Magazine accidentally printed our home address in one of their issues.

  At first, getting all that fan mail was great. But the fun soon wore off when the whole family had to answer the letters by stuffing envelopes with autographed pictures. Around that time, I ordered a Spider-Man T-shirt and a pair of those X-Ray glasses that were always being advertised in Marvel Comics, the ads that promised that with the X-Ray glasses, you could actually see through a girl’s clothes. Every time the mail truck arrived, I thought, Maybe today. Maybe today I’ll finally get that Spider-Man T-shirt or I’ll get to see all those naked girls.

  Week after week, the sacks of mail kept coming. But the letters and packages were always for him. Finally, the T-shirt and the glasses arrived. The shirt was a size too small, and I couldn’t see a thing through the X-Ray glasses.

  And the packages kept coming.

  For him.

  * * *

  I see a man gardening out in front of my old house. I pull into the driveway and introduce myself and the family. He says he’s Don, the guy who bought the place from my parents back in ’68. The boxes crammed floor to ceiling in his open garage leave no doubt that this guy’s been living here for almost forty years. He’s really happy to see me, tells me some of the changes he’s made to the place, mostly restoring things on our pretty white stucco house. He tells me the brick wall my father built along the driveway had to come down and that some fans came by and wanted to buy a brick. I get a good laugh out of that. So many rabid fans out there. Then again, if Ishi had built that wall, if the lone survivor of the Yahi tribe had touched those bricks, then I’d probably want one too. The kids want to take a look inside, but Don begs off, telling us his wife isn’t there and the place needs tidying up. I’m not that anxious to go in anyway. As we say our good-byes, Don tells me that he found some pictures of my dad in the house and that he’ll e-mail them to me.

  The next morning, I find three pictures in my e-mail, pictures I’ve never seen before. They’re publicity photos, and suddenly I’m looking through a time portal that takes me back to 1966. The first picture is of Dad with his hair glued to his head, his bangs cut straight across, his eyebrows half shaved. He’s sitting at the wooden chess table in our living room considering his next move. Across from him sits my mother, also apparently pondering her next move, even though she never played chess.

  The second picture is of Dad sitting on the steps between the dining room and the living room holding Brunsie, our dachshund, who’s trying to lick his face. The third is a picture of my father sitting in front of our pretty white house. You can see the whole bright front of the house clearly because back then, there were no trees. My father has a big smile on his face and that space-age hairdo. Sitting in the bright sunlight of the 1960s on top of a brand-new world that started with that TV Guide.

  The phone rings, putting an end to my walk down memory lane. It’s my mother. Mom’s a great gal with a big heart. But she’s also a Jewish mother, and I should have seen it coming:

  “Why did you have to ruin my Mother’s Day by making a joke out of that card?”

  HAPPINESS IS BIRD WINGS

  IT’S STILL WINTER, the winter I moved out of my house, winter in L.A., which means that any day we’ll be having a heat wave. But tonight it’s cold. It’s 10:40 PM and I’m sitting in my car in front of the skating rink. Just like she told me. 10:40 PM when the rink closes. Maddy says good-bye to her friends and gets in the car, and she’s really happy.

  “Dad, I just met the coolest guy. His name is James and he is so cute. I just can’t believe I met him and I think he likes me.”

  She’s so happy to tell me, and I’m so happy to hear this, because the kids have been really angry and upset the past few weeks about the fact that I don’t live at home anymore.

  Maddy is so excited that it reminds me of the time she was in preschool and she was in love—with her class and her teacher and with Matthew. One day, I walked her into school and she said I didn’t have to walk her into class and she ran into class so happy that she lifted her hands and flapped them up and down really fast with her arms close to her sides, like a little bird flapping its wings. And now, ten years later, she’s sitting in my car and she feels so good that she wants to share it with me.

  His name is James.

  Weeks go by, and because James goes to another school, I don’t hear much about him. This weekend I’m driving Maddy all over the place: to Nia’s house and Jamie’s and Erin’s and Sarah’s. Nimoy’s Taxi Service. She sits in my car and her little phone keeps ringing and she has to talk and coordinate with all these girls, and sometimes, she has to deal with catfights.

  “Maddy, you’re just so popular. How do you handle it?”

  “I like being popular, but sometimes I can’t deal with it. It gets so complicated and too much work and I just can’t handle it when people get into fights.”

  The girls are all going to a boy’s house today. Maddy and Sarah and Nia are going to visit James. It takes me a while to even remember that it’s James from the skating rink. He lives in Culver City. She’s very excited, and although they’re not boyfriend and girlfriend, she tells me they are such a good-looking couple. I figure I must be doing something right for a teenage girl to tell this to her dad, a dad who doesn’t live at home anymore, a dad who still, occasionally, gets hell for it. I’m so relieved to think I must still be doing something right.

  “What does his father do?”

  “I have no clue.”

  “What about his mother?”

  “They’re divorced.”

  When we get there, the neighborhood is a little funky but the house looks okay. There’s an old Lincoln Continental and an even older Chevy Malibu sitting in the driveway. The other girls are already there, standing at the front door waiting for Maddy.

  “Should I come in and meet James’s father?”

  “No, Dad, it’s okay.”

  “Maddy, I think I should come in and check it out.”

  “Dad, no! None of the other parents did that and you don’t need to come in. Love you. Bye.”

  And she slams the door and runs off all excited just like the day she ran into her preschool class, hands flapping.

  I drive away.

  And as I head down Overland Avenue, I start thinking about all the things I need to do to get my career back on track. I’m thinking about the brain cancer fund-raiser I’m working on and about the rabbi I’ve been interviewing, the rabbi who had a brain tumor that miraculously turned out to be benign. I’m thinking about something he said when he was first diagnosed: that he wasn’t so much afraid for himself as for his wife and especially his seven-year-old daughter. He said he was terrified when confronted with the possibility of his daughter’s future without him. And that gets me thinking about Maddy. Then I start thinking about that old Lincoln and the Chevy Malibu sitting in the driveway. Then I get this feeling that something’s wrong. And then it hits me:

  Dude, wake up and get with the program! You just dropped your daughter off at some stranger’s house. Remember when you were her age and you found yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing because no one was watching?

  I make a U-turn.

  Right in front of a cop.

  But the cop doesn’t come after me. I race back to the house. I jump out of my car and ring the doorbell. The dad answers. Holy shit.

  “Hi. I’m Adam, Maddy’s dad, and I just wanted to say h
ello and introduce myself.”

  The dad’s got short gray hair, thick silver hoops in both pierced ears, a snaggletooth among his front teeth, and deep lines in his face. He reminds me of Keith Richards, like he’s done some serious partying, like he’s been to hell and back via the mainline. He has this sour look on his face like I interrupted him when he was in the middle of doing something.

  Like slamming heroin.

  “Hi, I’m Chris, James’s dad.”

  With some trepidation, I offer my hand.

  “Yeah, hi. Yeah, I just dropped Maddy off and thought I would come back and just say hello.”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  And then there’s this awkward silence while I think about how the hell I’m going to get her out of there. Or maybe I should just sit in my car out front in case she needs me. Or maybe I should call the cops and do a background check on Chris. But I’m looking at Chris, I’m looking at him, and I start thinking he sort of looks familiar. There’s something about him that reminds me of someone and it’s not Keith Richards. And then I suddenly figure it out; it’s the snaggletooth.

  “Chris, what’s your last name?”

  “Kelton.”

  “Kelton? Chris Kelton? Oh, my God, it’s me, man, Adam Nimoy!” Chris’s eyes go wide. He breaks into a smile, giving that snaggletooth center stage.

  “Adam Nimoy! No way!” He opens his arms for a bear hug. Then he invites me inside.

  When I was in high school, Chris was best friends with Matthew, my next-door neighbor, and the two of them taught me just about everything I ever needed to know about drinking and getting high. One of my favorite memories is of Chris standing in my bedroom, and he’s got this huge head of curly black hair and he’s wailing away on a Stratocaster guitar that’s plugged into a waist-high amplifier I was borrowing. And of course, we were wasted. Chris and Matthew were a year older than me and I just thought they were so cool. Needless to say, my parents weren’t thrilled about our beautiful relationship.