Clothing Optional (9 page)

For me, depression has always been a moody guest that stays until I get bored with pampering it. When I was younger and had a dearth of responsibilities and an overabundance of spare time, I was a more indulgent host who actually welcomed the condition as an old friend. It was a comfortable and able protector from the world outside myself until I felt ready to retake my place among the living. But today, like any so-called adult, I find the temptation to withdraw frustrated by the demands and needs of those who depend on my being strong.

My wife and I have three children. There names are Adam, Lindsay, and Sari. And like all parents, I love all of them the same. There are no favorites, though each of them has traits that are favorites of mine. Adam is thirteen years old, a wonderful athlete, and I love the fact that he hides his
Playboy
magazines in the same places that I used to. Lindsay came next, and for the first four years of her life I loved the way her songs and giggles filled our home with the unbridled joy of a child confident that she was loved. That's why, when Sari was born, it was important that Lindsay be reassured that she was not being replaced as Daddy's little girl. Suddenly a middle child, Lindsay proudly accepted congratulations on her promotion to big sister. But one couldn't help but notice how her eyes seemed to wonder if this was happening because she had somehow failed in her role as recipient of all the attention that Sari was now getting.

This issue was addressed during those special times that Lindsay and I set aside for each other. We danced in the living room before I left for work in the morning. Every Saturday we drove to the same Chinese restaurant for a “secret lunch” to discuss, at length, the events of the previous week in our respective worlds of adulthood and kindergarten. And when
The Nutcracker
came to town, I put on a blazer, Lindsay wore a dress, and we had a “date.”

The stuff between a father and a daughter is a melody of unconditional firsts. He's the first man to hold her hand. Smile when he sees her. Give her flowers. Hug her when she cries. For me, Lindsay was the first girl I had no trouble singing to in public. Whose crib I hung out by just to watch her sleep. Who I allowed to stand on my shoulders so she'd get a better view of Snoopy at a Thanksgiving Day parade. I also wrote little notes to Lindsay that I put in her lunch box. Last year, while sitting at her desk at Open School Night, I came upon an envelope in which she kept all of these little notes. And tacked to a nearby bulletin board was her composition about how she wanted to be a writer when she grew up.

A connection had been made, and needless to say, I felt great. But the infatuation was mutual. And still is. Lindsay is a beautiful and popular fifth-grader who plays soccer, takes dance lessons, loves the Beatles, and writes poems when it rains. She believes in the tooth fairy but once left a dollar under her little sister's pillow when I forgot to do so. And she wrote numerous letters to Dennis Byrd, the injured New York Jets football player, when the news said that he might never walk again. We play cards in the kitchen and duets on the piano, and we both cry every time we see Steve Martin play basketball with his daughter the night before her wedding in
Father of the Bride.

Yes, the bond is sweet and real, and it wasn't difficult for her to detect the fraudulence her father felt when he was hurting yet tried to appear strong to his family.

—Hi, Daddy.

—Hey, Linz.

—Why are you so quiet?

—Oh, I'm just sitting here thinking.

—Are you writing something?

—No, not really. I'm just sitting here thinking.

—…Dad?

—Yeah, Linz?

—If I tell you something, do you promise not to punish me?

—What?

—I mean it. There's something I really want to tell you, but I don't want to get in trouble for it.

—You won't.

—Promise?

—Promise.

—Okay. Ready?

—Yeah.

—Fuck 'em.

—Excuse me?

—Those people who are saying those things about you and the movie. Fuck 'em.

—Lindsay…

—Well, what would you say to me if I did a project for school and my teacher gave me a bad grade?

—Well, I'm not sure that I'd say f—

—You would ask me if I tried my hardest, because that's the best that anyone could ask for, right?

—Right, but…

—So that's what happened to you. Only difference is that instead of a teacher, you got bad grades from newspapers and magazines and that guy on Channel 4 and…

—What guy on Channel 4?

—Dad, it doesn't matter. Didn't you once tell me that Angie Dickinson never sold any of her poems while she was alive but she kept on writing them anyway because deep down she still thought they were good poems and that she was a good writer?

—Emily Dickinson.

—Whatever…Dad,
you're
a good writer. A lot of people think that. Even that guy on Channel 4 said that you're a good writer.

—He did?

—Uh-huh. He just thought that you should have your head examined so you won't write anything like that again.

—I see.

—Wow, you actually smiled.

—…Linz?

—Yeah?

—Do you still like to write?

—Uh-huh.

—You do?

—Sure.

—Why?

—Because it makes me feel comfortable.

—It does?

—Yeah.

Perhaps it was her delivery. Or the setting. Or maybe the time was just right for me to be receptive to something obvious when offered by someone special.

As for my daughter's language, well, I promised that I wouldn't punish her for her choice of words, so I didn't. And though I probably could've busted her on “respect your elders” charges, she got away with a warning. And a thank-you. She got me writing again. And while there's no guarantee that I will be able to assume a cooler, less emotional, more philosophical posture the next time my words are subject to review, I refuse to look that far down the line. At the moment it's more important that I feel comfortable.

Political Positions

I am writing this from a squatting position. Cowering, actually. Inside a small closet in my home in Los Angeles. I spend an inordinate amount of time here these days. Eating. Sleeping. With an occasional reprieve for either a bathroom break or a conjugal visit with my wife, who is similarly hiding in another closet. Such is the result of being in Hollywood during a political season that makes any of the recent storms endured by Florida seem like sighs from an elderly aunt.

For me, politics began in a seated position. In dining rooms. Around seder and Thanksgiving tables where, as a young boy, I would listen in wonderment as relatives liberally employed the present tense when talking about FDR, who, at that point in time, had been quite dead for well over eighteen years. However, even my most polite suggestion about conjugating the verbs in deference to a previous generation were answered with shouts of “You're too young to understand!” Which I didn't. And still don't, because the vast majority of those very relatives are now just as dead as FDR and selfishly took all explanations to their graves with them.

In college, politics moved outdoors and, for the most part, I was standing. Shoulder to shoulder with dozens upon dozens of fellow sloganeers voicing outrage about Vietnam, Nixon, Agnew, and Kent State. Standing upright was the position from which we were best heard. It was also the best position to start running from the tear-gas canisters being fired in our direction. The decibels of my relatives had been replaced by the chemicals of the National Guard, and if I wanted to spare myself burning eyes and irritated flesh, getting a good running start was advisable.

After I enjoyed life for many years as an East Coast writer, a television show I'd created brought me out to Los Angeles. The promise was exciting. I remember walking off the plane looking forward to raising our young children away from the travails of New York winters. Little did I know that walk would be the last time I actually stood up in this town.

I should probably mention here that my politics are, by and large, left of center. Notice I said
my
politics.
My
opinions.
My
feelings about what is right and what is wrong with the world we live in and the course of action we might want to consider to indeed make things better. And while I can hold my own in a political discussion, I admit that I am not smart enough to write about it. Which suits me just fine, as I am not so passionate that I would feel the need to express myself even if I were smart enough to write about it. That I leave to others. All I ask, as a human being who is trying his utmost to get from one end of his life to the other—and perhaps leave his mark on some areas where his strengths
do
lie—is that my opinion be respected. Especially by those whose opinions are the same as mine.

That's my problem, however. I am not liberal enough for my liberal friends. Nor am I vocal enough for my exceptionally loud friends. Quiet dinners seem to be a thing of the past, as discussions are no longer the exchange of ideas so much as tests of resolve. My friends are shouting the way my relatives did at those FDR dinners. And all my attempts to stand are met by forces strong enough to drive me backward. And penniless. More times than not the candidate everyone's supporting is actually present at the home we're invited to, so checkbooks are required. Recently it cost my wife and me three thousand dollars to have dinner at a friend's house, and we still ended up stopping for something to eat on our way home. Invitations descend upon us like plagues. They are faxed to us. They arrive by mail on engraved stationery. And they are e-mailed by people who've embraced self-aggrandizing causes.

“Since when do you care so much about elephant poaching?” I asked a lifelong friend I thought I knew.

“Me? I don't give a shit about elephants.”

“Then why are you hosting Kenya Awareness Night this Thursday?”

“Because this director I really want to do my movie is into it, so, you know.”

“Jesus…”

All of our friends attended Kenya Awareness Night. We didn't. I happen to like elephants. But it was my father's seventy-seventh birthday. My father doesn't have strong feelings one way or another about elephants. He wishes them well, but he didn't necessarily want to spend his seventy-seventh birthday paying homage to them. So we took him to dinner at a local Italian restaurant, brought our nine-year-old daughter along with us, and returned home to a barrage of phone messages chiding us for not being there.

So now my oldest friend is angry because he feels that a seventy-seventh birthday isn't milestone enough to miss a pachyderm-fest. His ecologically sensitive wife is angry because the restaurant we took my dad to serves veal. My agent is mad because the Kenya Awareness Night party had a lot of people who could help me with a project I am currently trying to launch. His environmentally active wife is even angrier because we drove to the Italian restaurant in a car that wasn't a hybrid. And we just learned that my seventy-seven-year-old father is upset because our nine-year-old daughter didn't know who FDR was when he managed to bring his name up twenty-four times during his delicious birthday dinner.

It's come full circle. Make that full circle and then some. At least when I got shouted down at those seder and Thanksgiving tables I retreated to a seated position. But out here, in a town where social status is based on what people think everyone else's perception of you is, I've withdrawn. To my closet. Where I write in a squatting position. Where I plan on staying until the moving men come and load me into a van headed back to the East Coast. Where I can stretch my legs.

The Queen and I

Not long ago, I wrote a television pilot for a network that shall remain unnamed. It was a family comedy about four generations living in the same house. The executives at the unnamed network liked the script so much they gave me the go-ahead to make the pilot. A budget was approved. A director and writing staff were hired. Sets were designed and built. Locations were scouted. A shooting date was set. And an audience of three hundred was invited.

But then, after we'd spent well over a million dollars on the project, I pulled the plug on it because of a disagreement with the unnamed president of the unnamed network. The issue was casting. He didn't want me to give any roles to anyone over the age of fifty. I politely reminded him that this was just a tad absurd given that unless the series was going to be about the most precocious Amish family that ever lived, the prospect of Great-Grandpa being forty-eight years old just didn't ring true to me. “Do the math!” I argued.

“Alan, our audience isn't that literal.”

“So we're saying these characters had children when they were twelve?”

“Trust me. No one will notice.”

         

Looking back, I think I would have lost a lot of money over the years if I'd bet on writing about life as it really is. I was one of the original writers for
Saturday Night Live,
and as a full-fledged member of the baby boom, I figured there'd always be a large, built-in audience for my work that would age at the same rate I did. I simply assumed that as our lives progressed to include marriage, children, home owning, receding hairlines, escalating belt sizes, more nocturnal trips to the bathroom, etc., whatever my friends and I were going through at any given moment would become a never-ending source of entertainment fodder.

But I was wrong. Mainly because I had no way of predicting that when I reached my early fifties, the executives I'd be dealing with—and dependent upon for my livelihood—would miraculously still be in their twenties. Some had been hired right out of school; others were the same people who'd been on the scene back in the 1970s but they'd obviously been working so hard they never took the time to age.

How did this happen? Why am I the only one in Hollywood who got older? Why doesn't anyone else remember Vietnam? Or Willie Mays? Or blue suede shoes?

Think I'm kidding? Then how else would you explain the following conversation that actually took place between me and an unnamed executive at an unnamed movie studio?

“Great script, Alan. We just have a few notes.”

“Sure.”

“Starting with the character of the wife.”

“Eleanor.”

“Yes. She seems rather serious and unsexy.”

“Well, Eleanor Roosevelt
was
rather serious and unsexy.”

“Fine, but if we want to get Queen Latifah to play this part, we might have to make a few minor adjustments.”

“Queen Latifah?”

“Yeah, she's real hot since that movie she did with Steve Martin, and she's looking for her next project.”

“Queen Latifah as Eleanor Roosevelt?”

“Wouldn't that be great?”

“No, it's absurd.”

“Why?”

“Because Eleanor Roosevelt wasn't black.”

“Why are you being so difficult?”

“I'm sorry. I'm just having a little trouble envisioning the star of
Barbershop 2
being married to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

“She's an incredibly versatile actress, Alan. We're even thinking about having her and whoever plays Franklin do a big dance number.”

“Excuse me?”

“Maybe a hip-hop thing in the White House or in front of Congress.”

“But FDR had polio. He was in a wheelchair.”

“We have a note about that, too.”

         

I ultimately got fired from that job. The unnamed executive at the unnamed movie studio told my agent that I was out of touch with today's audiences.