Going to “Higher” Ground

Let the record show, I, like everybody else from the Palisades and the surrounding areas affected by our devastation, am tired.

Not in that persnickety way that annoys people who have their own problems. No, I’m fatigued to the core of who I am and probably have been way before my life burned into ash. I am profoundly exhausted in a way that I have to think twice about operating a motor vehicle for the safety of myself and others.

So, stop kvetching and sleep, you say…Could not agree with you more… But, as though constructing a character for a bad 80s sitcom like Mr. Belvedere, that REM satisfaction is also currently being denied for me as the Santa Monica based ENT, Dr. Wong, was kind enough to make the determination that, on top of all of the other disasters of Biblical proportions suddenly coloring my world, I have benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. Big words for the constant feeling of wanting desperately not to be tall enough to get on the roller coaster from hell that you can’t quite get off of as you’re strapped in for the long haul and against your will. Lying down makes it worse…and standing straight is grounds for falling onto your face now fractured.

Not one to be defeated or balled up in a fetal position, I thought, “Hey, why not take advantage of the kindnesses offered at the hotel and let them order an Uber to destinations unknown?” Well, unknown and within a three mile radius. Poof, a lightbulb went off. And I knew just where I had to go.

Target.

Well, not actually Target. I wanted to go to UCLA as it was one of the places in my life that was currently still standing and not smoke damaged. I just couldn’t decide where on campus was the appropriate destination, so asked to be dropped at the major retailer in order to figure things out like my route.

People say in the case of flooding, emergencies, and mid life crisis, you should go to higher ground. What better than the grounds of higher learning I had desperately wanted to be a part of from childhood?

The road to matriculation from this fine institution was not an easy one for me. Granted, I was smart, albeit lazy in my intelligence as some often are when things come too easy to them. I got the grades, had the extracurricular activities, and enrolled in classes with the letters “AP” in the title while in high school. The problem was, as it can so often be, unexpected, and my late mother came to me and stated, during the summer before my senior year, I had but a few choices. If I wanted to go to UCLA, I would have to move to her Palisades summer home now and finish high school there because she couldn’t guarantee Dad would be able to afford to send me to university and by establishing a year of residency prior, I would qualify at this venerable institution as a Californian, thereby paying lower fees. Wait, I thought in my adolescent addled brain. I thought Dad was a rich doctor…

Get in the car and I will explain it on the four hour forty minute drive was her directive. I was confused. She drove a black Maserati with a wooden steering wheel when other moms had faux wood paneling on the sides of their station wagons. Maybe that’s why they couldn’t afford out of state tuition…

And now here I was, decades later, bracing myself to walk from Target through the hallowed halls and leafy campus. No visible backpack, just lugging memories through my exhausted steps.

My mother, the queen of magical thinking, made it happen. When I was depressed to be at Pali where my summer friends had fall lives I wasn’t a part of, when I cried how much I missed the high desert, my friends, my standing in Las Vegas, she would bribe me with a turkey sandwich from the deli at Gelson’s, then wonder aloud why I was letting myself go and getting plump. When I joined the tennis team at Pali where I was both a nobody and feeling forced to take lessons from Mr. Kling to be on the team when I was captain at Bishop Gorman with Andre Agassi’s best friend feeding me tennis balls, I promptly quit because I didn’t have team spirit at the beach. But, at UCLA, one of my best friends, Charles, would play tennis with me as I daydreamed about becoming a Bruin within a few months.

The walk down memory lane was helping the vertigo and with all other examples of muscle memory, I walked the same route I had taken three decades before…

My mother fought hard to motivate me to believe in myself enough to attend UCLA as an undergraduate. When I wanted to give up, I remembered my spirit animal, Jim Morrison of The Doors graduated while possibly on hallucinogenics, so I carried his book of poetry in my backpack as inspiration. When I got in, I played it safe and settled on Political Science with reluctant aspirations of attending law school. I was no Jim Morrison who had settled on film.

There was a determination in my steps as Target is a considerable distance from the furthest point of north campus where my internal compass was taking me. The vertigo was subsiding (does vertigo subside?) and the exhaustion of loss and soot in the lungs was lifting…

My mother reminded me of how profound an impact Professor Walter of UCLA Film had on me during a two unit throwaway class I had indulged myself and how meaningful it was when he admitted me into a 135, which was a writing seminar of 8 students. This class was meant for film students as they needed it to graduate and rarely opened up to other majors, but the strength of my writing afforded me a spot.

Screw law school, follow your dreams, go to film school, she said…

Sitting oceanside in her Palisades place, I balked. I wanted a stable career as in being a lawyer. Nobody got into film school; they got jobs as waiters with their ideas shoved into their back pockets. UCLA was the premier program in the world with 1100 applicants vying for a mere 22 spots. I would be disappointed. I couldn’t afford any more heartbreak, I argued like any good litigator might.

Go to film school, she said. I will always support your dreams. You don’t have to do what everybody else is doing. Find what it is you are passionate about.

I was getting closer and closer to it on my walk. My stride felt as determined as it did when it was in its 20s and the world of possibilities seemed endless and people still actually went to the movies…

But, I will never get a job. It’s too hard. So few movies are made, Mom, what if I end up a starving artist?

She countered, “At least, you will be fulfilled for trying. You’re a beautiful writer. So, write.”

And then there it was. I was at the crossroads of my past, future, and fire damaged present when I reached for the doors at UCLA’s Melnitz Hall, walking through fire to get there then and to reach there now, I knew she wouldn’t want me to give up…

So, I went to the film school now just as fixated for me to as she was then…and I write about it now….