51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life

by Kristen McGuiness

  “So, you’re really smart, huh?” he asks.

  I want to say: Yes, I am. And you have no idea what a pain in the ass that is. Back in 2002 when I moved to Hollywood, I once had my own starstruck dream. Long before I found myself answering phones at a nonprofit downtown, I thought I was going to make it big. I moved out to L.A. with one screenplay, half a novel, and a laptop. I thought that between the jacaranda trees and the Hollywood sign and the lights of the Sunset Strip that some kind of fame might be mine. After two years in Los Angeles, I met and fell in love with Oliver, a successful Hollywood producer who I thought would be the answer to that dream. I would write books and screenplays, and he would make them into movies, and I too would see my Hollywood star rise.

  But that wasn’t reality. At the time, I could barely pay my bills. I would go to the local gas station, and it would be me and a bunch of female CHAs in their convertible BMWs. For all I know, they might have had PhDs in nuclear physics, but I get the feeling that their M3s came more from modeling gigs and wealthy older boyfriends. And I hated them. I wanted so badly just to have their good highlights and small button noses, and then I wouldn’t have to do anything more than ask for a light in order to find love. Though being well-read and asking the tough questions and being considered a challenge to the men I dated might have helped me feel better about myself, I would wonder whether it was all worth it. Whether the CHAs had this thing figured out with a lot less thinking and a lot less disappointment.

  I don’t know how to respond to Doug’s question. So I cock my head to the side and say something to the effect of, “On good days,” which makes no sense. As though on my bad days, I become a blithering moron. It’s actually on the bad days when I am too smart, when I overthink and overdose my head with thoughts about who I am and where I am going and why some things just aren’t meant to be.

  We finish dinner, and I need to get going. I am picking up my friend Siren to go to a party at the Standard in Hollywood. Even though I don’t live there anymore, even though a part of me has moved on since that dream, I still like to visit the universe next door from time to time. Doug and I leave the restaurant, and I am laughing. I feel totally comfortable.

  And here is where the dilemma is revealed: Would I like to go out with Doug again?

  Sure.

  Would I like Doug to be my boyfriend?

  No.

  And why not?

  I don’t know.

  For all my smarts, I know even less.

  6

  Date Six: Desperado

  I hang up the phone with my father and stare dumbly at the porch of my friends’ beach house in Oxnard. My friends John and Teresa stay in this house every winter. It is one of those Big Easy rentals that make real life feel very far away—an old wood cabin with wind whistling through its walls. We have to climb out a window to get to the backyard, but it’s well worth it because the backyard is the roiling Pacific. We come home smelling like salt, and every November I look forward to this time with my friends, lounging in blankets on the cold, wet sand.

  Though this weekend is technically not a date, it feels like it has pushed me closer to love than any encounter I have had so far, and I wonder whether that is all these dates might be: real experiences in the search for this thing called love.

  If that’s the case, then next week my visit to my dad will probably be one of the most important dates of my life. I will be face-to-face with him for the first time in years, and for the first time since I got sober, and though there is a part of me that wants to see him, that has dreamed of seeing him, there is also a part of me that is really, really scared.

  My father was arrested when I was four. I don’t remember it happening. He was in Panama City with his mistress at the time, and my mom and I were down in Ft. Lauderdale, staying with my grandmother because everyone, except for my father, could feel that the end was near. I should say it wasn’t the first time my father had been arrested. Before I was born, he had spent time in Mexican prisons, escaped from every jail they had put him in, and by the time I came along, had graduated from small-time pot dealer to one of the biggest marijuana smugglers working in 1977. Certainly not a cottage industry then, if ever.

  I am consistently told that I loved my daddy like no one else on earth. I could be balling my eyes out, but once I was up and in that man’s arms, it was all I ever needed. To be cradled by his love. He would lift me up and my back would straighten, and, according to the uncles who later played my fathers, I would instantly become a preening Queen of Sheba. To some he might have just been a big-talking con, barking orders while coke fell out of his nose, but to me he was the King of Diamonds, my Ace of Spades. And later, when I too became a big-talking con, barking orders while coke fell out of my nose, I thought I might actually be him. I would imagine him standing at the head of some table, leading his men into the next job, and I would try desperately to feel him in me even when he was far away. I would look for him in the lines of blow, in the shots of whiskey, in the loose memories I had of him all before I was five.

  After the big arrest in 1981, I remember the police coming and taking the car away from my young and confused mother. She was begging them not to leave us stranded, and then when they threatened to take the Hartmann suitcases and the Louis Vuitton carry-ons, she began to cry because we would be left in this motel parking lot, with no way home, with the last things we owned laying in a pile on the pavement. I remember running up a green, grassy slope because I just wanted to get away, I just wanted to put space between me and the pain that had been struck into our life. Everyone knew the odds, including my mother, but I know that they were also hoping that my father was being honest when he promised that he was bringing in the last big load. The one which would allow him to retire and invest in legitimate businesses, and those years in the illegal drug trade would become a dark, distant memory for us all. But things rarely go that way, and so instead, I remember the nice police officer leading me back to my mom as she watched the very shaky deck of cards that had been our life fall all around us in a motel parking lot in South Florida.

  I know that I went to the hearing, though I don’t remember much besides running off again and walking back in through the wrong door, positioning myself between the judge and the lawyers’ tables. I remember people laughing and being led back to where my family sat. I’m not even sure if these are real memories. Or if somehow, I had fantasized it all at such a young age and still carry it as truth. This image of me standing innocently between the judge and my father, making some sort of stand about the injustice of it all.

  My father was initially sentenced to sixty-six years with no parole because whatever one might be able to say about his success rate as a smuggler, he had been more than successful at pissing off every US Marshall, DEA, and FBI agent along the Eastern seaboard. Because the fact is, my daddy is a career criminal, a drug-smuggling con, an outlaw and a cowboy, and he isn’t going to stand for anyone telling him what to do. And if you want to find an archetype that creates a romantic figure that forever leads you into impossible romances and irresponsible love, well, there you have him. When my dad was officially sent away, I would catch my mom crying while she drove me in her Buick Regal. She would hear some song like “Desperado” by the Eagles, and I’m sure she would wish that this man with whom she had naively fallen in love would come to his senses, would stop riding fences, would let someone love him, before it was too late. But it was too late, and he never came home again.

  Twenty-six years later, my dad sits in yet another federal penitentiary. Lompoc. Danbury. Allenwood. I know them all. You wouldn’t think to look at me that I would. It always comes as a surprise to people that an educated young woman with preppy clothes and a deceiving set of dimples could carry such baggage, but I do.

  My dad still thinks the big load is on its way and that the only reason he wears an orange jumpsuit everyday is because the system fucked him. For a long time, I was on his side. I worked at High Times and wrote ar
ticles about legalization and the best head shops in the country. Whereas other young writers were out doing their internships at Vogue and Vanity Fair, I was celebrating 4:20, the international pot-smoking hour, with aging hippies and hemp dealers named Dolphin. I believed in the romanticism of drugs and the lifestyle we once led, before the cars were taken and the suitcases were emptied, and the only reason we survived was because my grandmother had the foresight to steal $20,000 my father had hidden in her couch during one of his drunken stupors. She was terrified to do it; she cringed every time he would come over and sit on that same couch, but she knew one day it would just be my mom and me, and no amount of half-hearted promises from a convicted felon would be able to pay our bills. Growing up I knew very little of the dark side of my father. All I knew was I wanted to be a Desperado too.

  But things change. I went home to Dallas to cease my own drunken stupors, and I discovered that not all cowboys have to live on the range. Not all cowboys need to gamble their lives away in order to prove they have lived. Because by my second month in Dallas I met someone who showed me that true cowboys work hard to be there for their families; they fight hard to protect what they love, and live hard not because they don’t care but because they care so damn much. By my second month I met Louise, and Louise changed everything.

  Louise is the type of woman who traditionally would have intimidated me. She wore tall Tony Lama cowboy boots and wild fringe jackets and had a tattoo of the Virgin of Guadalupe covering her entire back. But I was so desperate for help, I was willing to sacrifice my fear, and so I complimented the belt she was wearing the first night I saw her at a meeting, and we became quick friends. Louise is fifteen years older than me and, at the time, had two years of sobriety, and I was willing to believe anything she said. She became my first sponsor, and when she told me that we could do anything as long as we were sober, I believed her.

  Which is why, nearly three years and one crazy relapse later, I sit excitedly in the passenger seat of Siren’s car, waiting at LAX to pick up the woman who meant so much to me. We are driving up to Oxnard to stay with Louise’s oldest friends. Since the eighties, she has run with the same crowd, which still includes her friend Ivan, a former dope dealer, John Knight, a violent alcoholic/speed freak, and Teresa Tall, the quintessential restaurant-owning drunk. Within the space of two years, and all pretty close to their fortieth birthdays, they got sober and have been since.

  When I first moved back to L.A., I was pretty much on my own. Sure, I had my old friends, but my old friends still stayed up until 10:00 a.m. in the morning, searching for their own lost fathers in unlimited booze and hazy talk. After my brief relapse with them, it just didn’t mesh so well with sober life. So instead, I borrowed Louise’s posse.

  I turn around to where Louise sits in the backseat. “Someone I like is going to be there,” I tell her.

  “Who?” she asks with her slight Texan lilt.

  “Maybe you know him. Jimmy Voltage?”

  She thinks. Her nose slides up a bit because she does that when she thinks. “I think I’ve heard of him. He’s some aging hipster from Silver Lake, right?”

  I laugh, “Yeah, I guess. Except, he’s not that old.”

  Jimmy Voltage is thirty-nine and an electrician, hence the nickname. He has been sober for three years and has a twenty-year-old son. Louise isn’t wrong. He is a bit of a hipster, with his glitter motorcycle helmet and a studded belt that actually has the word “Voltage” beaded on the back. He is tall, with haunting shoulders, an easy laugh and an even easier smile.

  I met him the previous summer at a moustache party. Moustache parties were all the rage in hipsterland that season, though it meant we all had to try to look our best with glued-on facial hair. I arrived at the loft Jimmy Voltage was renting at the time, looking a bit like Chris Cornell from when he was in Soundgarden. We had seen each other on and off at meetings since then, but never really had the chance to talk. Until now. Because as I stand in the warm glow of my friends at the Oxnard house, I know the moment Jimmy Voltage walks into the room, looks at me and smiles, that is about to change.

  I don’t typically go for the popular guy. I prefer the quirky loners and the class clowns and the curly-haired intellectuals, but something about Jimmy makes me forget all that. Over the next day, Jimmy’s increasingly flirtatious attentions are making me feel like the high school girl who has spent the better part of the year writing bad poetry in the back of the library only to come out and be swept away by the prom king.

  Later that night, we all sit around the beach bonfire. Jimmy keeps taking photos of me with my friends. “Oh, that’s a good one,” he says as he looks at the picture on his digital camera and then leans over toward me so I can look. My hair falls against the “Banana” tattoo written across his wrist, and I know we can both feel that primordial surge rush up our arms and down our spines. That thing that I search for all on all dates, in all men. That experience that means very little in terms of compatibility or likelihood of success but is the number one reason people fall in love. That thing called chemistry.

  Nothing happens that night because we’re both playing it cool and sober and really quite polite. The next morning, I wake up and go outside to smoke a cigarette. My phone rings, and I see it is my dad. He is currently serving out a one-year sentence from a parole break in 2006, and we confirm my visit for the following weekend. I tell him that I am at the beach, and I can hear the sadness in his silence. For years, we have spoken while I have been in exciting and adventurous locales across the world, and he has sat in the same public phone room with the hum of other inmates making similar calls. I hang up and breathe deep and join Jimmy where he sits in a lounge chair, staring out at the ocean. His smile is so warm and welcoming; I can tell he has been thinking about me too. It’s a cloudy, cool day in Oxnard, and with all of our turtlenecks and wide-legged jeans, it feels like a day straight from the seventies, when my father was still riding fences and not hanging up the pay phone in prison.

  Jimmy and I sit smoking, staring out at the ocean. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that I am about to see my dad for the first time in three years, or if it’s that I love telling people the wild, surprising story of my father, but I want so badly to open up to Jimmy about it. I want to tell him that my dad hasn’t seen the ocean in twenty years; I want to tell him that I will be traveling many cold and snowy miles next weekend to get to his maximum security prison in Pennsylvania; I want to tell him that I think my dad would like him. Because Jimmy rides a motorcycle, and flies a helicopter, and is a capable man’s man, and would be just the type of Desperado I figure my dad would want for me.

  Jimmy tells me that his dad was an alcoholic. And I tell him that mine is too. He tells me about watching him die from cirrhosis, and speaking at his funeral, and getting the chance to be the type of dad to his son that his father never was to him. I get up to put out my cigarette and as I walk back, I pass his chair. And I don’t know why I do, but I put my hands on his shoulders. He slides his own hands up my wrists. He smells my perfume, his face close against my palm. It has been such a long time since someone has touched me so softly and intimately. I stand there staring out at the gray waves with Jimmy’s face pressed against my skin, and I don’t want to move. Ever.

  That night we all go out to dinner, and I sit with Jimmy. Though nothing has happened yet, I know something will. I can feel it in the way people are looking at us, in the light brush of his knee against mine, how he laughs at everything I say and watches me when I get up to go talk to Louise at the other end of the table. I need to get home as I have to work the next day. I am putting my bag in Siren’s car when Jimmy comes outside. He pulls me in for a great deep hug, and I look up into his warm, tan face, and he smiles down at me, and I cannot believe that this friendly weekend trip has ignited more romance than I have seen in years.

  “Have you ever been to the Observatory?” Jimmy asks me.

  When I was twelve years old, living in Dallas, the hottest v
ideo running on MTV at the time was Paula Abdul’s “Rush, Rush,” a Rebel Without a Cause-inspired mini-movie starring Keanu Reeves. And I remember looking at them as they pretended to be Natalie Wood and James Dean and wanting to go to the Griffith Park Observatory. Unfortunately, during the three years when I lived here before, the landmark was under renovation the whole time. Ever since I moved back, it has been up there waiting for me, taunting me every night when I drive home, and at this one perfect crest, I see the entire, famous thing.

  “Would you like to go to the Observatory?” he asks.

  “I would love to,” I say.

  I think he is just going to hug me, but then his lips are against mine. His tongue lightly along my mouth, nervous systems flushing and popping, and I am melting into his arms. This is a kiss. And I go home that night more dreamy and beautiful than I have been in some time.

  7

  Date Seven: Pie Crust Promises

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” my mom asks. My mom and I sit in a Budget Rent A Car on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. I don’t know why mom even bothers to ask. I doubt I have much choice. I know my dad is waiting for me.