MOVIN’ ON OUT

Later Days, California

I thought for sure I would die in this apartment, but the Great Magnet had other ideas.  I’m leaving my sleepy California dream home.   ( I’m not telling anyone where I am going, I’ll surprise you all when I get there. )

Moving was unthinkable to me after the trauma of my penultimate move, which was a shit -show of dastardly proportions.  I remember crying in my Brooklyn basement at 4AM, with the bloody movers reaming me for another 4 grand as I tried to move 1200 square feet of stuff into 250 square feet. 

Your Erstwhile writing girl has been ejected from her Olympus where she filled yellow legal “Big Chief” pads full of hapless literary scribblings.   She will now enter the work force, like Jason Robards at the end of “A Thousand Clowns.”  (He’s a feckless bohemian, see — he used to be a comedy writer for a kid’s TV show but he saw the vulgarity in it and went on a general strike for a few years.  Then the local Child Safety officials came after him and forced him to go back to work, if he wants to keep his son.  This movie makes more sense to me now than ever.) 

The worst thing I have to move is myself, translation: boxes and boxes and file cabinets and more boxes of stuff I wrote before the internet era, which can now only be found in print.  Plays I wrote on a typewriter.  Yellowing magazine articles.  Reviews of my plays. All the things that used to make me think I was a legitimate human being are now like a wagonload of dead skin I am carting around.  Someday I’ll find a scanning service, throw it into the cloud and be done with it, not that anyone probably cares. 

One of the most irritating things about moving these days is that books just aren’t worth shit.  I just loaded about 12 boxes of books into a junk truck, where I was assured they would be “recycled.”  There were definitely some books in my collections that shouldn’t be pulped, but it was a wholesale gangland bloodbath in my library, because I am leaving the state.  Shoveling books into the trash makes me hyper-aware of how largely worthless my entire literary career really has been. 

I was just watching a “Kids in the Hall” sketch about a guy who writes a 160 page suicide note, and none of his friends bother to read it. “Cut it to 50 and I’ll give it a look,” he tells his friend in the hospital, after his death attempt.

What was a major revelation is how much shit I had that I hadn’t looked at in 8 years, and really didn’t need anymore. 

I was giving some major discounts at the yard sale on Saturday.  Rick Owens shirts, $4.  Giorgio Armani Tux jacket, $5.  Vintage Smith-Corona: $40.  

California is where I was born and where I lived until 1995, before moving to New York.  Then I moved back to California eight years ago. I can feel California in me every evening when the light turns peachy and you get that Maxfield Parrish juxtaposition of blue and orange all over the stucco. 

I came here for the birth of my nephews eight years ago and never left.  I became Aunt Chi-Chi, while trying to pivot away from the dying industry of books and journalism.  I never successfully pivoted.  It made too much sense being Aunt Chi-Chi, so I kept doing it, because I am so gaga for the kids.  And thus I ran out of money. 

America does not value its artists, let alone its critics.  Forget its devoted Aunts. 

The last straight job I had,  I was a 24-year-old Jagermeister shot nurse.  Now I will be working an actual full-time job I feel incredibly fortunate to have gotten.  It will be a radical departure from my NoCal bohemian lifestyle of loitering in my backyard with a cigarette and a White Claw and a joint.  Not that I haven’t been doing anything productive all this time.  I have a “best selling” Substack.  I sell paintings.  I created an entire TV show which never went anywhere.  I started, and very much enjoy, editing other writers. I just haven’t been able to pay the rent with all my side hustles.  I needed a main hustle. 

So I’m starting an entirely new life.  I’m leaving proximity to the kids and to the excellent boyfriend — these are things that really take a SAWZ-All to the heart.   At the same time, I am shedding a lot of people who I’ve realized have never been good for me.   People who said they’d have my back and didn’t.  Other people I had no faith in showed up like angels. 

It really showed me who my friends were, and weren’t. 

An accumulated debris of decades was thrown into a junk truck today.  All I am taking with me are the best of my life things, and leaving the rest. 

It’s a happy ending, really, when Jason Robards goes back to work, because in the words of his son, “You were becoming a bum, Murray.”  Underemployment will wreak havoc on your bank account, to say nothing of amping up your weed consumption.   It was sink or swim for me, and I am coming up for air. 

My point, and I do have one, is that I have had a really valid literary career, back when those were possible, so don’t cry for me, Argentina.  My return to manual labor will be a great relief to me.  It will beat the shit out of trying to maintain any kind of actual life as an artist.  I bled out that vow of poverty  as long as I could. 

I’ll keep doing the Substack, of course.

But I will cry for California.  For the hills and mosses and waterfalls and nieces and nephews and my gorgeous muscle car and the tremendous boyfriend and the light at dusk.  They are all on my mind and in my blood. 

But I got a whole new destiny afoot.  Hope my Doc Martens hold out.  Hope the job lasts.  Hope the boyfriend moves my way, eventually. 

Goodbye California, you fickle bitch.  See ya when I see ya. 

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Theme song: Jack Black

Artwork: “Julie,” oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2020

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