Blog 7....Writing Project 1 Draft 2 ………Josh Spear

Writing Project 1 Draft 2 ………Josh Spear

I never was attracted to the obvious, I never played it safe. I never wanted the same shirt as someone else. I certainly never thought that’s the way it was. I never felt settled. I certainly didn’t want to stay the same. I would never do what was expected of me. I always went way to fast. I rolled the dice twice when I should have held them in my hand.

He sat there behind the desk like a corporate leader in a movie. But this was no movie and he was a corporate giant and his desk was huge and his suit was better than David Letterman’s. I just sat there and told the truth knowing parts of it were a lie and parts of it were the things I knew I was supposed to say but secretly deep down I was buying time. I was different I thought. “I’m going to be an actor for three years and if I don’t see progress I will stop and go to college”. Grandpa Arthur said that sounds very sensible and gave me a loan.  We then agreed this was a private business arraignment between men.  Neither of us needed to deal with dad on this one. Sometimes a loan sort of skips a generation.

The little apartment was in an ally and it was mine. Smelling and hearing and feeling the ocean waves crash on the pacific coast from a block away. Buying dinner out whenever I wanted without having to check in with anyone. I was fighting with Alison on the phone and I got pissed and hung up on her as hard as possible. Then I redialed immediately, she picked up again so we could continue with our psycho, jealous teenage fury. This time the phone sounded like the voice they use in movies to represent slow motion.  Within a minute, I was across the street standing in the deli parking lot at the payphone with a fist full of quarters and I was one- hundred percent committed to blaming Alison for breaking my phone. When you’re a grown-up with an apartment and a girlfriend that you need to argue with and torture each other, it’s hard to find time to fit in stupid things like school.

I got halfway through two different semesters of two different junior colleges on two different occasions. My heart was not in it. I liked working and being free and acting like an adult with my fake ID.I loved have older friends and a tiny studio in an ally way, one block from the southern California beach. I loved the freedom. I flourished as I basked in the lack of obligation. Plus I had my entire future ahead of me and I really didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up when it came to things that required an education.

Bakersfield community college they called it.  I missed my ally apartment and the beach. This was the city where the Okie’s from “Grapes of Wrath” ended up and it was fucking hot all the time, dessert hot. School was three freeways away and everyone looked unfamiliar. The one friend was this girl named Tamboura that I was making out with, but of course she had just broken up with someone and now I was the new guy in town with the group leader guy in towns’ ex-girlfriend. It was like every misplaced teen character movie ever written. Instead of going to class I would drive through the long empty roads in the fields for hours at one hundred miles per hour in my brand new used Volks Wagon Golf. I’d kill time waiting for my brother and his friends to get out of high school. Most of the time I would run over the future conversation in my head about how to explain this to my mom and dad.

Back to the beach with a less cool apartment, plus now I had a torn leg muscle in a leg brace. I still cringe when I think about the sharpest sickest pain I have ever felt. My vision went red and blue from the inside and I felt like the sun was inside my skull. Then I dragged myself up the steps using the railing. I hurt so bad I was unable to cry. After that every morning would start with me and Jon Flahive trading my Volks Wagon Golf for his van because I couldn’t drive stick with the leg brace and he couldn’t drive the stupid van if my brand new shiny used Golf was available instead. Alison and I both went to El Camino Junior college which was great because now we could fight in person and try to go to college at the same time. I had become institutionalized at high school and assumed I had to go to college real early as well. The van changes, the mornings, the arguing, the job, the life of a guy with a fake I.D. all began to clash. 

Even to this day people ask what college I’m going to or went too. I have been explaining that I didn’t go to college for about twenty years. They are always surprised I didn’t go. My family and friends are of such a lifestyle that even without a proper education I have known more than many but without that piece of paper to validate myself to the common inside the box thinking type of persons. When I was aggressive id laugh at their stupidity, when I was sensitive I felt like I let everybody down, when things were going my way it didn’t matter. When my job felt like it completely sucked with no end in sight, Id fill with regrets again. At least my crappy side job could be of a higher quality.

With the exception of war and tragedy, you see the worst side of people when you are a waiter in a restaurant. There was the pregnant lady, who used her pregnancy as an excuse to boss me around and her mother proclaimed “she’s pregnant” “Well I didn’t do it” I said. The people who said “Get me” or “Listen I want”. The fucking uniforms, god! talk about soul stealing and formulating a lack of individuality. I hated having to bring bread and food and drinks and ketchup and mayonnaise to pretty woman on dates with other guys that you had to wait on. I had resentment towards the specials; on the other hand the mangers cared a lot about the specials. I never got that. “You need to say the specials”! “Tell them the specials!” “Did you memorize the specials?” “Excuse me, but what are the specials”? My status quo answer for twenty years was. “To be honest, the menu is much better than the specials, I would stay away from the specials if I were you.”The customers would always thank me for this inside tip that kept them from ruining their dining experience. I have denied so many people so many specials for so many years that there is probably a little restaurant table waiting for me in hell where I can’t order specials for the rest of eternity. Or perhaps the waiter will start reading a list of every single special from my first day as waiter up to my last day as a waiter, while I listen and wait to order, for eternity.

Don’t get me wrong. I did things some people can’t imagine happening and some things people don’t even realize can happen. I have easily had nights, years, weekends, months and moments just as insane as Hemmingway and as crazy and debaucheries as Henry Miller. The things I did while others went to school gave me an education you cannot apply for, and very few can afford. I've been treated by the rich and famous and I’ve been welcomed by the people of the streets and the underbelly. Sociologically I am the definition of well rounded.

Right from the start I was where I belonged. From my first step into the crazy, wild times, of the New York City scene. Ethan made that white powder available and things began to speed up a little. I remember the Bowery Bar Christmas Party when Susan yelled over the heads of everyone. “Josh I am coming home with you tonight (pause) and Laura’s coming with us.”  Near the end of the decade there were many landmark weekends. One was in the Hamptons and I had been awake for about sixty hours. I could over hear Ted whom called himself the “Blue Blood” because he was a blueblood telling his blueblood friends that we were like a “British soccer team” because of our behavior.  We spent the next two years referring to ourselves as the British soccer team. In contrast, I did understand where he was coming from. I mean, we had already, started a bon fire in the backyard which had NO bon fire area, just smack dab in the yard about fifteen feet from the nine  room wooden house. We also had brought back four limousines and two Hummers full of people to Ted’s house for an impromptu party at four in the morning the day before. Plus we wouldn’t stop laughing at him for trying to put out our fire with a bottle of tequila. He was so mad he threw tequila on the fire thinking it was water and that just made it even more exciting. Ted left after that and we stayed at his house in the backyard around the warm fire until it died. But even at my most inebriated, the clear voice in the back of my mind behind all the yelling, screaming, drunken, stoned, drug fueled, voices kept repeating “is this what you want.”

That was ten years ago if not slightly longer. In these last ten years, I started to see the world differently. The different decisions and precedents I had set would need to be counteracted by an opposing internal force. I felt as if I must begin the process of clarifying my voice in order to get what I truly desire. I have seen too many wrongs and I want to make them apparent to all. Speaking isn’t enough .Speaking, thinking, writing, doing and succeeding is not a, nine to five job. It’s an all consuming lifestyle.

My car was parked. My meter was full. I was crossing Madison or Lexington, I forget. I had one or two hits of weed to stay calm. I was going to Fulton, the fish restaurant that was named after the fish market. It was an exquisite place, the type Uncle Harvey went to. Harvey was one of Grandpa Arthur’s three brothers. Arthur had passed many years earlier without receiving my return of the loan. I could see Harvey sitting there in the booth looking exactly like Arthur used to look and the way I would someday look after a few more decades pass away. I was preparing the answer to the same question he had been asking for years. This particular time, instead of asking myself why I should go to college, I asked myself, why shouldn’t I go to college? I felt relief wash over me. I had been spending the last year or two telling myself that something big and different and special would eventually show up if I just stayed strong.  When I told Harvey I was going to take him up on his offer he truly smiled and expressed genuine gratitude to me! Harvey thanked me for letting him help make my life a better place to be. We finished our fish and smiled and ordered coffee and some fresh upscale donut holes accompanied by three sauces, chocolate, raspberry, and caramel. I loved it. I was going to do something different. College at forty.

After I have succeeded in the acquisition of a degree I have not yet chosen I will be continuing on in a similar lifestyle to the present, only now I will carry with me, discipline, knowledge, confidence. I’ll get respect from those who haven’t given it and I will be officially qualified to change my world. I will have a degree and piece of paper to show others that I have completed an important cycle of life in a first world country. There will always be more than one me, inside myself, but like a great general I must someday put my wars aside, because my party wants me to run for public office. Sociologically I am the definition of well rounded.