I can see it clearly: the musty one-bedroom apartment, two floors up, a view of the parking lot out back. There’s a hotplate, mini-fridge, cabinet full of booze, an old wooden frame bed and a handicap accessible bathroom. I’ve seen it many times, and I will be there soon enough.
And I can see this: the back of a limousine, window half down, the warm desert air shuffling in as it begins to get light. There’s a band of pink strip lighting, mini-fridge, cabinet full of booze and a young woman curled up across from me.
The thing is that they’re same thing, just at different speeds.
I’m looking for someone to answer to, someone who knows what matters most in this life, someone who has unequivocal answers about what I’ve done and said and should do and say next. I had a sense when I was younger that it was an older person, like my mother or father, someone had lived life and knew things. It took me time to figure it out, but I now know that the answers aren’t there.
I scroll through my phone in the evening, go down through the numbers to see who there is to talk to, who I know that might help me to make some sense. There are many friends and family who help for a time, who say the right things and make me laugh. But it eventually runs its course and I am drifting off and thinking of who else there might be.
It might be as Carrie Fisher mused. “All these people we weren’t finished talking to, that we will never be talking to until we see them again someday and pick up where we left off. Or we can talk to them as we go along, like talking to ourselves but so much better.”
Anyway, I just want to know what this so very wise person might think of my script about this guy who makes all of these calls during the pandemic, leaving messages for family and friends, hanging up when someone answers, and then killing himself in the end. It’s a dark comedy. It’s a little funny, right?
