Saints

I'm sitting in a Starbucks in Santa Monica, California.
Two days ago I sat beneath the rainy black ocean night of Santa Cruz.
So many Santas, so little presents.
In Santa Cruz, everything is recognizable. The night smells of seaweed and mist. The cars slow to a steady creep, the downtown lights illuminate February's fog like red and blue searchlights.
I had arrived with hopes to mend a broken stone with tape. scotch tape. wet scotch tape. I zipped my little rented Hyundai down Mission street, next to Planet Fresh, past the old familiar two-story parking garages and into the Vallarta parking lot (Vallarta is a taqueria that's tried, tested, true, and gives you food poisoning 1/250 times). Stepping out and clicking the beeper, my little car was locked and it flashed its lights to let me know that things were OK.
Ahh electronic devices, always there when you need them.
Often, I like electronics more than humans. They have their character-traits (you have to squeeze them or shake them to make them work) but they turn on when you need them to. They enjoy your company, and quietly obey and flash their lights when you push a button. so you know that everything is going to be OK.
I walked away from the car and immediately ran into Alanna Brostoff, someone I had texted less than two hours earlier from the center corridor of California, hoping for a secondary place to sleep. She hadn't written back, and so I coincidentally ran into her in person (rock ducky anyone?) and we chatted. But she was tired and so I headed on my way around downtown Santa Cruz with wet scotch tape hand. I found myself standing at the bar of a little corner restaurant called 99 Bottles. I ordered an Old Speckled Hen and walked outside in my black coat to gulp some sprinkles of night air. My stomach hurt from the wreck that my life was slowly becoming, and from the odd culture shock of Santa Cruz, from the long drive, too many tortilla chips and having no one to talk to about it.
I drank my beer in long daughts of a certain desperation, like the cowboy who downs a doubleshot of whiskey before heading out the saloon doors to face a draw. The wind was gusty, and spits of ocean dew pelted my face and coat. The beer was warmer than the night, it tasted bland and flat. So I finished the pint and set the glass down to go.

The next morning, my misshapen heart took to the road yet again, curling through the green trees and fog of highway 17, down into San Jose and across the bulbous hillsides of the outer Bay Area until I could see towering Mt Diablo on the horizon with it's shoulders shrouded in a blanket of grey. My wipers blinked, and soon I was driving through into Walnut Creek for my acting job (the reason I took this trip).
A delightful 6 hours was spent acting and playing.
Then I was stoned, tarred, feathered and hung with unsticky scotch tape dangling from my fingernails.
I drank a football that night, and woke up with it in my stomach.
On my way out of Santa Cruz the next morning, I wondered if I might know what it feels like to watch a member of your family get frozen in carbonite - ie, die and still be alive, frozen to death while living. You watch them go from moving and living to a frozen blank stare. a nothingness. You knock and call and beg and plead, but they can't hear you because they are no longer there.
Driving back to Los Angeles, with raindrops spewing over my windshields, I couldn't stop thinking about Han Solo's face with mouth half-open.
I arrived at Union Station barely after 2pm, after driving maniacally to the finish line between downtown high-rise buildings and the ghettoest of ghettos. I dropped off the Hyundai's keys in Budget's dropbox, and walked to a sunny court yard beneath downtown LA, where I fell to the ground. Heartbroken. despondent. shaken. exhausted. Unfixable. damp tape peeling from my wounds.
On the train I watched through the window as the sunny countryside rolled below. Across were lines of soft tall mountains topped in white, lit by warm sunlight. I passed villages within subvillages, birthday balloons and broken old tow trucks. Families playing in their yards. children on their bicycles. A couple kissing. A grandmother sleeping. The railway rolled on and dipped beneath the streets, into the ground. my warm world faded to black.

"SHAAAAAANE!! SHAAAANE PATTERSOOOON!!!!"
to which he answered with nothing.

It was an hour later, and I was standing outside Shane Patterson's house with my warming container of Ralph's salsa. He couldn't hear me. I didn't have the entry code for his apartment complex, and my cell phone had died minutes before. So there I stood in the waning Sunday afternoon, green jacket and warming salsa under my arm, notebook in hand. Out of tape. Looking for beer.
After a half hour of shouting I uttered some curse words and took off at a sprint down the 6 blocks to my house in Pasadena. I was still exhausted, but wanted friends and a beer to cover my heartache. The sprint landed me, after 8.5 hours of travel, to the front door of my own place in Pasadena. I banged through into the hallway, shoved open my living room door, dropped my book, switched my phone battery, tore my bike from the wall, grabbed my warming salsa, locked the door behind me and Lance Armstronged it back through the streets of Pasadena to Shane's impregnable apartment complex. He texted my phone "#2500" which I hastily entered, bashed through his front door, grabbed a beer and some chips and fell off a cliff until 7am this morning.

The Saints won. My commercial didn't air. Candice wrote me "#66".

The End.


Epilogue

The Saints won the Superbowl, and there are Santas and Saints and Sans everywhere you look. But nobody is a Saint, and nothing is Saintly. There is little good in this world, and it is coupled with so much deceit and little effort that I wonder why anyone even tries. Why I keep trying.
But still, Bob Dylan serenades me in this warm sunlit Starbucks in Santa Monica, and the sun is setting and people are shopping and talking and pressing their car alarm buttons knowing that everything is going to be OK. And I think, so do I.
My alarm button is this blog, and I write all curled up and calling out to you as I always have, to whatever gods or angels or deities that will hear me, to say that I'm not perfect but I'm trying to do good.
When my car doesn't start, I will forgive it and try another time,
because I love it so much. Every time it sputters, again and again,
I will forgive it while writing "I Love You" across its dash.
Because that's how I am.