So now what do I do?

I really don’t know. When I was turning thirty, everyone I knew who was in their thirties told me I would love the age. “You finally know who you are, and life feels more in your control!” I heard that a lot. Now guess what I’m hearing from everyone I know over forty? Same damn thing. Sure, my thirties had some wonderful elements. Obviously, I have a son and every time he hugs me and tells me he loves me I am overwhelmed with pride. And I am in a loving and strong marriage, constantly growing and learning and doing right by my wife as she does for me. That is no small feat, you know? We don’t consider it as much of an accomplishment in our society these days, our focus is always on money. But a marriage that works is a marriage that is always being worked on and there is no place for coasting. That is an amazing accomplishment. Artistically, I can be proud of my personal works, even if they have garnered little notice and no money. I did a one-man show, I wrote some books, I did a shoestring budget movie as a lead, I do podcasts and film commentary, I turned up here and there in little guest star roles in TV series, I did enough commercials to barely afford a small house. But do I finally know who I am? Not really. I developed chronic pain, a headache, early in my thirties and I am still suffering from it. I thought my career might kick up a notch, more work and more money, but instead I’ve just maintained this sort of lateral career path. I realize it’s all about luck, good and bad, the chips land where they will. And this very fact has made me wonder precisely who the hell I am. I don’t think I’m super smart, but I always believed I was too driven and talented to be completely dependent on the luck of the draw. So, best I can figure, if the thirties are when you finally learn about yourself, then I am a compulsive gambler with a headache that never sets foot in casinos, gambling halls, or even friendly neighborhood poker games. Is that really who I am? I sincerely don’t know at this point, but I’d like to keep believing that I’m something a bit more. And clearly, I am not in any more control of my life. Sorry, thirties enthusiasts.

The other thing I hear about the forties is that a person finally makes peace with the way life has turned out, even if it has no resemblance to what was you once dreamed it would be. That sure sounds nice. But it also sounds like resignation to me. But I will try. I will try to make peace with what my life has become. Perhaps I will finally embrace the label of “commercial actor.” We are the few, the proud, the actors who keep on going to audition after audition just trying to score a job that pays scale…always scale, never a bump. A commercial actor never gets nominated for awards, even though the stars get trophies just for being in the business so long (what, Christopher Plummer has never been nominated for anything? We must give him a trophy or our trophy show is failing!) Although I still maintain that I don’t care about trophies, I do want to do as much work in as many projects as the people who live in trophy land get to. But I guess it’s time to make peace with the fact that show business is a bitch and it’s unfair and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. These are things I’ve always known, of course, but I believed I would beat the system. So do I give up and make peace with my career the way it is? Especially given that there is really nothing I can do about it? Again, that sounds like resignation to me. But I certainly am tired. I am tired of the grind, of fighting all the time. I still harbor a hope that there will be more work, and the kind I enjoy. Not the kind I simply have to try to get and then when I’m lucky enough to get it, I have to do it because I have a family and I love them and there is nothing I wouldn’t do to ensure their comfort and survival.

But maybe what I need to make peace with is the fight. Maybe the fight doesn’t end until life itself does. Maybe what I need to make peace with is that I am an opinionated motherfucker and the world is just going to have to deal with me. I’m different and strange, and either world is going to accept that or not, but I am not about to conform. I can’t. It isn’t me. That’s where I need to find my peace, I suppose. It sounds counterintuitive to make peace with fighting, but do I want to give up? Just because I’m forty?

In the Jimmy Buffett song “A Pirate Looks At Forty,” (yes, I know it’s not cool to like Jimmy Buffett if you are a Los Angeles art type, but I don’t care) he says that his occupational hazard has been his occupation just isn’t around. I am no pirate, so the fact that “cannons don’t thunder and there’s nothing to plunder” doesn’t bother me so much. But I am an actor. And I have red, curly hair and I have the complexion to match, so there isn’t a ton of stuff out there for a guy who looks like me. But I get work anyway. So maybe the industry will come around, at long last, and shoehorn me in there despite how I look. Or maybe I’ll always be on the outside looking in. And I guess that’s where I have to find this forty-something peace. I have to be at peace with the fact that I will always struggle against popular perceptions. I have to be at peace with the fact that I always have to do my best, no matter how little my best might yield.

Or maybe I’m over thinking this. Maybe it’s much simpler. Maybe the only thing I need to make peace with is one solemn and basic fact. And it is one more thing that I really don’t have any control over, even if I’ve always thought I did. It’s making peace with the one element of me that has frustrated me the most, but at the same time has led me on a rather incredible journey that has rewarded me not with money, but with family and friends and the occasional moment of tiny triumph (the brief sound of applause in a small theater or club, or a nice comment or two posted on the web about my work.) It’s a truth I can do nothing about. But it has given me some amazing things, even if it usually feels like it’s taking, taking and taking, sapping me of all my energy. You know what I’m talking about, right? Yep.

I am an actor.

Me, I want my writing to always be…mine.

But, yes, I would like to get published. Really, at forty years of age, I’ve reached a point where I will happily enjoy acceptance from just about anybody. I would like to be welcomed into somebody’s artistic community. No matter how small. So I wrote a short horror story (I like horror stories) for a small publication, one of the only magazines I could find willing to accept unsolicited submissions from unknown writers. I wrote something that I thought was fun, funny, and action-packed. Now, I admit when I write I like to shake up the foundations of grammar. It is a choice, not the result of ignorance or laziness. I often use long, silly sentences that a high school English teacher would call “run-on” sentences. But “run-on” sentences are usually very difficult to understand, and I believe mine make perfect sense. I use them for comic effect, and in the particular instance of this story I submitted, I used these rambling sentences to evoke a hectic feeling. You see, that’s a choice. Maybe you don’t like it, that’s fine. But the feedback I got on the story was simple: I didn’t put all my information at the top of the page, and I use “run-on” sentences. I figured that since I was submitting by email, all he had to do was read it and respond to my email…why would he need a bunch of information at the top of the page? And I already defended my “run-on” sentences, but it seems to me if you are running a publication, you should be able to see that an artist is making an off-beat choice as opposed to treating him like you are a high school english teacher (and by the way, every english teacher I ever had would point out these grammatical errors I did on purpose, but often say they appreciated that I was doing it despite their obligation to proper grammar. Which this guy didn’t. Which means he publishes works but doesn’t have the deeper understanding of artistic license that an average english teacher does.)

But you know what? Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he’s right. Maybe you would agree. So here it is, run-on sentences and all, for you to judge. (Once again the internet is the only place where I can turn myself on the world…of which only maybe four people will notice.) I call it:

The Christmas Squirrel

It was madness.

Morning always was.

 After another groggy awakening, alarm going off and the boy barging into the bedroom, dear old dad was up and the silent house was suddenly a bustle of half-panic in order to get the grade school teacher and the kindergartner out of the door in time. How people who didn’t have a teacher for a wife and a kid going to the same school got everyone everywhere they needed to be on time was beyond him. Despite the limited funds provided by a teacher’s salary, he still thanked the cosmos that he had a teacher for a wife. Yeah, it sure is great what an underpaid educator does for children and society at large, but really his gratefulness came down to a matter of logistics.

He knew the house was small and easy to fill with noise, but he was still always amazed that a mere three people could create what felt like an indoor tornado.

 Used to be that he and Marg took turns on lunch making duty, but now he was flying solo. She was putting on the make-up, and he was in the kitchen hassling with the two whining cats that wanted their morning meal of moist canned food (rest of the day they had to deal with the dry stuff.) He heard her talking to Ben as she got herself dressed.

“You need to get dressed for school right now or you won’t have time for breakfast.”

“I know.”

“Of course you know. But you’re still not dressed.”

“I had to get some toys for the car.”

“You do that after breakfast if you have time.”

“I know.”

 “Why do we have do to do this every morning?”

“I don’t know. You’re the one who starts it, not me.”

“Ben. Get dressed. And don’t forget to make your bed and feed your fish.”

 He gave his usual grunt of frustration, and stomped off to do all the stuff he hadn’t yet done that he knew he was supposed to do because he had to do it every damn day. And the cats circled the dear old dad’s ankles, and rubbed against his shins, and whined until he placed the food on the floor, and he knew exactly how his son was feeling. He put the tin foil back on top of the open cans, put them in the fridge (which had started making a funny noise a week earlier, but he had already tuned it out) and then pulled out the fixings for sandwiches. Roast beef today, mayo and mustard (no mustard for the boy,) multi-grain and mass produced gluten-rich bread, packaged cheese slices, and pickle chips. He used to add lettuce and tomato, because really that’s supposed to be the healthy part of your average sandwich, but he got too many complaints about wilted leaves and soggy bread, so instead he now added a small side of either baby carrots or grape tomatoes which were never eaten by either of them. But at least he was giving them the option of eating their vegetables.

 Before he started assembling the sandwiches he started the coffee brewing because if Marg didn’t get her giant to-go mug she would be extra cranky, and her routine morning impatience with everything was bad enough as it was. (She wasn’t a cranky woman, quite the opposite actually, but she was never a morning person, and given their current situation and the pressures that weighed her down, he did everything in his power to make sure she had no reason whatsoever to get annoyed or angry.) Dumped some coffee in the reusable filter, poured filtered water into the reservoir, and then he started the old coffee maker brewing. Marg was a lot more precise about measuring the coffee than he was, and she insisted on it because she believed eyeballing it led to a bad tasting brew, but unless she was actually looking over his shoulder he used the eyeball method. She never complained, so he figured either she didn’t really notice the difference or had given up the criticism due to the daily morning pandemonium.

He also put the kettle on the stove and started it for boiling, and put a packet of oatmeal in a small bowl. Ben liked oatmeal. Really, it was the only thing he liked. (Well, pancakes and waffles smothered in syrup, but that was reserved for lazy weekend breakfasts.)

 So, back to the sandwiches. He laid out the bread, spread on the condiments making sure to remember which pair had mustard and which didn’t, then he layered on the meat and the cheese and the pickles. He topped the pile with the other slice of bread, cut the sandwiches in half, and jammed the sandwiches into some plastic containers. He put the containers along with the vegetable snacks and an apple for the wife and banana for the boy in the lunchboxes, one a simple green and the other adorned with superheroes. He put ice packs in each, because this was Southern California and Southern California can get hot even in winter and heat is not good for perishable food items. As he packed, Marg and Ben came out for breakfast, and Marg made herself toast with peanut butter and finished putting together Ben’s oatmeal.

“I want juice,” said Ben.

“Try that again,” he said.

“May I please have some juice?”

 Marg smiled. “I love the sound of that.”

Dear old dad poured the juice.

“Did you make your bed and feed your fish?” he asked Ben.

“Yeah, I…oh, no, I made my bed but forgot the fish.” He jumped up from the breakfast table.

 “One day this stuff will sink in, right?” dear old dad asked Marg.

“Who knows?” she answered. He gave her a peck on the cheek, and left her to her toast.

He started to clean up the kitchen. Ben returned and joined his mother in inhaling a five-minute breakfast at the “dining room” table which wasn’t a dining room at all but part of the “great room” combination of living room and dining area which wasn’t “great” at all but tight or “cozy” if you are a real estate agent.

“And aren’t you forgetting something?” Ben asked his dad.

“Right,” he answered, and then walked over to the Christmas tree in the corner of the living room. He plugged it in, and the lights started blinking while various ornaments started turning round and round, connected to special Christmas light adapters that had loud little motors that spun in a circle.

“Yay!” said Ben.

And then breakfast was over and sunblock was applied, school materials collected, kisses and hugs and good wishes exchanged, and that was it. The door closed. The car pulled away. The cats were asleep.

The tornado was over.

He unplugged the tree.

 And the involuntary stay-at-home dad was left alone to have his own quick breakfast, and neaten up the house and do the dishes while he listened to a podcast or two on his iPhone which he really could no longer afford but couldn’t bring himself to get rid of. When he was done with the morning chores, he switched from the chatter about the latest movies and sporting events to some metal music from his high school years because it was the only music that provided the right kind of inspiration for his morning jog. He used to go to the gym, but that wasn’t in the budget anymore.

“Nothing is in the budget anymore,” he said aloud to himself. His older cat, an overweight tuxedo, looked up from her nap on top of the cat perch, and he flipped her the bird.

 He changed from his bathrobe into a pair of old shorts (old was all the wardrobe he had anymore,) left on the T-shirt he had spent the night in, and strapped on his well worn sneakers. He went out the back door, did a couple quick stretches, walked through the back gate, and geared up mentally for his daily attempt at burning the fat on his belly that kept getting bigger anyway.

 His struggling lemon tree next to the garage with the peeling exterior paint seemed to get uglier every day, and on his way out he noticed a couple caterpillars climbing up the trunk. He stopped to look closer, and saw that there were several of the fuzzy little things making their way out from the trunk to the branches. One of them crawled to the underside of a branch and just…let go. It fell to the ground below, and a squirrel scampered out from one of Marg’s “hummingbird bushes” as she called them, and it snagged the caterpillar and ran back for cover.

If he knew a damn thing about caterpillars, he would have known that this was not normal, but he didn’t and all he could think was that he would have to go to Home Depot and spend money on poison if he wanted to save the ugly old lemon tree.

But first things first. Fat had to be burned. He used to make jokes about all the poor people down the street that were so fat…how could poor people afford so much food? But he knew now that it wasn’t that easy to stay away from food that makes a person fat when you have no money. Cheap food is cheap food, and it is salty and fatty and carb-heavy and loaded with chemicals and the more you eat it the fatter you get. Would all economically challenged folks go to Whole Foods if they could? Who knows? But it doesn’t much matter, because healthy food is too damn expensive. And the other trouble with unemployment is of course the temptation of having a few drinks every night, or more, because what the hell does a hangover matter when all you have to do is get up and make some sandwiches and clean the house, and then listlessly surf the net to prove to yourself that no, there still aren’t any jobs out there.

 When he first switched from the gym to what he jokingly dubbed his “environmental workout,” he ran in the street because asphalt has more give than concrete, but he needed his music to do his run, and as a result had not heard a couple cars coming and those cars had come too close. So with every footfall his middle-aged knees felt the pain of unrelenting concrete which he ignored because he was fat and fat was not good for getting jobs in the advertising industry, especially when young lookers were everywhere who worked for less money and even as he changed his asking price he found that the young pretties were still the favorites, experience and competence be damned. It used to be that the good looking people were only in front of the cameras, but dear old dad had watched as the powers that be surrounded themselves with more and more beauty behind the scenes. He got it, sure, who wouldn’t want gorgeous all around? But he had paid his dues. And his dues didn’t matter.

 One foot fall, slap, then the next, bang, and his knees whimpered in protest, but the AC/DC and Metallica made it possible to fight through the pain. When he jogged, he was in his own body, in his own head, and he barely noticed his middling middle-class suburban neighborhood. He didn’t notice the green lawns, or the occasional yard that had gone native, covered in shrubs and succulents that could survive the dry landscape. He didn’t notice all the adornments of the holidays, wreathes and strings of lights everywhere and lawn decorations.  (If he had, he would have complained to himself about those inflatable Santas and snowmen that stood tall at night when their fans and lights were on, but lay flat and ugly during the day while their owners were at work.)  He didn’t notice the Hispanic landscapers loading and unloading lawn mowing equipment from their near broken down old tiny pickup trucks. He didn’t notice the little girl playing in her front yard while her mother cleaned up the weeds from her flower beds. He didn’t notice the green leafy trees lining the street he was on, or the tall palm trees looming over the neighborhood from the next block. His head was up but his eyes weren’t registering anything except the occasional bump in the sidewalk to avoid a face plant. (He had fallen once on a jog, had cursed the world for cheating him out of a gym membership, and wound up going to the doctor because a skinned knee had become infected. And on a teacher’s medical plan, that infection sucked up an entire week of unemployment insurance.)

But then he did notice something.

It was a squirrel.

 It was a squirrel in the middle of the sidewalk. It was very still, sitting back on its haunches with its head held high, and it was looking at him. He kept running, figuring the bushy-tailed rat was just startled and would soon dash away, but the squirrel didn’t do that. It stayed still, staring. He slowed his pace in order to give the squirrel some extra time to get out of the way.

“Stupid thing,” he said to himself.

But the stupid thing wasn’t changing its position. And his footfalls slowed until he was walking, and then he was a mere fifteen feet away from the rodent and it still hadn’t moved. Suddenly the squirrel wasn’t the only thing absolutely still in the middle of the sidewalk. He remembered when he was a kid his mother had warned him about docile animals. If you see something like a squirrel that doesn’t run when you come near it, that doesn’t mean it is friendly and wants to be pet. It could be a sign of rabies, and you need to get away as quickly as possible.

This squirrel didn’t have any froth around its mouth, and it didn’t seem angry as many rabid animals are, but it still didn’t have that main characteristic of most small, scampering woodland creatures: fear.

He took a step back. The squirrel didn’t move, so he took another step back.

He waited. He watched. The squirrel then took one small leap toward him, and then was still again, back on its haunches. It cocked its head a bit to eye the jogger.

“You looking for a handout?” he asked, thinking that maybe this was a park squirrel that had wandered into the neighborhood, tame and interested in people because he had been treated to a lot of handouts by picnickers.

The squirrel took another leap toward him, and he took another step back. Then the squirrel took three leaps in a row, hopping to close the gap, and he took several steps back, his hands now up in front of him to defend himself.

 He could hardly believe this was happening, squaring off with a squirrel. What did it want? Was it sick or just hungry? He didn’t want to take any chances. He took three large steps backwards, then turned on his heels. He began to jog in the other direction. He didn’t want to light into a full-fledged sprint, he didn’t want this aggressive little thing to sense fear, but when he glanced back over his shoulder, the squirrel was following. It wasn’t moving quickly either, but even moving slowly it was closing the distance between them.

“Shit,” he said aloud.

He wondered if anyone was watching, he wondered if he looked ridiculous trying to get away from a squirrel. He was a grown man, six feet tall, and he was unnerved by this furry little thing. His son had a stuffed animal squirrel, cute as can be, and when he was three his favorite thing was going to the park with dad and watching the squirrels. And now, for some reason, dad was afraid. Dear old dad was afraid of squirrel.

Time to run for real.

He lit into that sprint after all. He hadn’t run that fast in a long time, and why would he? Only people who run like this are Olympic sprinters and people who are genuinely running for their lives. His brow was bursting with sweat, the salt stinging his eyes a bit, but he didn’t think to wipe it off. He just looked over his shoulder again to see that the squirrel had picked up its pace as well and that’s when he realized that this wasn’t just some odd occurrence anymore that would result in a funny story to share with his family over dinner. This was a chase.

It was a chase.

He passed by a couple of landscapers who barely looked up from their leaf blowing, and he imagined they didn’t notice the tiny creature he was running from and figured he was just a fast jogger. He came around a small bend, nearly tripping on a tree root bursting up through the sidewalk because he was looking over his shoulder again. The squirrel was a mere four feet away at this point, and in seconds it would be nipping at his heels. He saw the tow-headed little girl playing in the yard that he hadn’t noticed before and he had a split second thought:

She was an easier target. If he outran this thing somehow, it would change its sights. He took a sharp right into that front yard, tore across the deep green grass, left muddy shoe prints on the deflated Santa and Frosty lawn ornament, and grabbed that girl with both hands and held her to his chest. She screamed and starting kicking at him, but he just held her tight. Behind him, he heard her mother scream.

“Put her down! Put my daughter down! Help! Help us!”

He didn’t stop, and ran through their open front door. The little girl’s mother came tearing in after them. He threw the girl into the living room sofa, and she screamed even louder, then he turned around to push the hysterical woman to the side, and slammed the door shut and locked it. The door actually seemed to buckle when the squirrel hit it from the outside. He moved from the locked door to look out the large picture window directly to the left. He saw the squirrel stumble to the middle of the yard, shake its head, and then it stood up on his haunches again, and stared at him through the window.

The little girl’s mother was holding her crying daughter on the sofa, checking her for injuries.

“What do you want from us?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, catching his breath and trying to gain control over the panic. “I’m sorry…it’s just…”

“Get out,” she commanded, standing up.

“I can’t,” said dear old dad.

“Get out of here right now!” she yelped.

“I can’t.”

“Mommy?” asked the little girl. “What’s happening?”

“There’s a squirrel…” he started to explain.

“Don’t hurt us!” the little girl yelled.

“I’m not going to hurt anyone! There is a rabid squirrel out there!”

The woman, her light brown hair spilling from under her bandana, clearly thought he was insane, and changed her approach. “Okay,” she said in a soft, condescending voice, “you are afraid of a squirrel…that’s okay…just let my daughter and me go and you can stay inside and you’ll be safe.”

“Did you not hear it hit your door? I’m not letting you out there.”

She grabbed a wireless phone off the charger sitting on the end table next to the couch. “If you don’t let us go, I’ll call the police.”

“Fine,” he replied, “yeah, call them. Call animal control, too.”

“Please,” she said.

“Call the fucking police!” he yelled at her, hoping playing into her assumption that he was a crazy man might get her dialing.

It did.

“Yes!” she said into the phone. “We are being held hostage in our own home by some crazy man. Okay, I’ll stay on the line.”

“Good,” said dear old dad. “I’m not crazy. I’m your neighbor. I live a few blocks away.”

The little girl burrowed into her mother’s side, looking out at him from behind an arm.

“I like your tree,” he said to her, pointing at the huge tree a few feet to the right of their stone fireplace. “What do you want Santa to bring this year?”

The little girl started to answer but her mother cut her off. “Don’t talk to my daughter.”

 “Sorry,” he said. “I like your house. It’s very nice. My wife would love to fix ours up the same way.” The house had finished hardwood floors, was perfectly painted with crown molding, had furniture that matched. The direct opposite of his place. He had begun secretly harboring disdain for people that had made real money. And the tree? It truly was spectacular. It looked like something out of Martha Stewart, decorated uniformly in silver and white, including frosted branches. And it smelled so sweet, it smelled like the holidays. He wouldn’t even have had a tree if they hadn’t bought the fake one eight years prior. “I really do like your tree.”

She said nothing, just stared daggers at him with the phone up to her ear.

 He looked out the giant picture window to check on the status of the squirrel. At that moment, he saw one of the many busted up old little landscaper pick-up trucks pull up to the curb outside. Two men, one young and one old, most likely father and son judging by their similar features, both wearing grungy jeans and button down shirts, got out and put ramps up to the truck bed in order to get a lawn mower down and out. The younger man put a leaf blower on his back and grabbed a gas-powered weed wacker. He disappeared around the side of the attached garage.

“Is your squirrel gone?” asked the woman.

“I don’t see it,” he answered. “But your guys are here, we need to tell them it’s out there.” Dear old dad started to wave his arms and shout, “Hey, guys! Look out for the squirrel! There’s a rabid squirrel!”

The old man looked at him, squinting to see him better, the sun reflecting off the window and making it hard to see inside.

“The squirrel! Look out for the squirrel!”

The old man started for the front door when the young man stumbled back into the yard, clutching his shin. Blood seeped in between his fingers from the bite wound beneath his torn jeans, and he struggled to get the leaf blower off his back. He was cursing in Spanish, and the old man turned to help him. The young man started to scream, falling back onto the grass still clutching his leg, and then he began to convulse.

The old man stood over him, not knowing what to do, terror in his eyes.

“What’s happening?” the woman asked.

Dear old dad’s eyes were wide with panic. “He was bitten! One of your guys! He was bitten…something’s happening, I don’t know. I need to go out there…I need to help…please stay here…”

She got up from the couch to look out the window as he started for the door. He stopped dead in his tracks when she screamed. When he looked back out the window, he saw the young man had the old man pinned to the ground, and had buried his face in the old man’s chest. The old man started to yell.

“What the fuck is happening?” he asked.

“That’s a bad word,” the little girl said quietly, but nobody heard her.

“He’s attacking him!” she yelled.

“Jesus,” he said.

And then they both saw the squirrel bound out from behind the garage, look at the two crazed men, the old man’s chest now covered in blood. The young man sat up from his feast, his face completely covered in chunky redness, and growled. His growl did not seem that of a savage human, but rather that of a…beast. Some kind of inhuman beast.

 The squirrel bounded across the yard to the flower bed and disappeared behind a large aloe plant. Then the old man was up next to the young man, his chest a bowled out mass of gore, white ribs glinting in the morning sun. His eyes were wild, and he joined his grunting landscape companion with his own animalistic noises. And the two of them started stumbling around the yard…looking for something with wild eyes and gnashing teeth.

“Still think I’m here to hurt you?” he asked the woman.

The little girl got up from the couch to see what they were looking at.

“Stop!” he commanded and she stopped in her tracks. “We can’t let her see this.”

“He’s right, sweetie,” said the woman. “Stay on the couch.”

“What’s going on?” a tinny voice asked from the phone.

“I don’t know,” answered the woman.

“Zombies,” dear old dad said.

“What?” she asked, beside herself.

“Let’s not have the conversation and all the disbelief,” he answered. “If you aren’t comfortable with the term, okay, but I don’t know what else to call it.”

The old man stumbled toward the window.

“Okay,” he said to the woman, “let’s get away from the window, we don’t want him to see us in here. We don’t want him trying to get in.”

The woman was frozen in disbelief. He grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the window. He turned around to see how many lights were on. It was just the tree. He ran to the corner, got down on his hands and knees, and yanked the plug from the socket.

“Why did you stop the tree?” the little girl asked.

“Shh,” he said in a whisper, “we can’t make any noise.”

 The woman snapped out of her stupor, and moved to the sofa to wrap her arms around the little girl for comfort. For what seemed an eternal moment, he just stared into the woman’s eyes while still on his hands and knees, and it was clear all she wanted was to hear some words of assuagement, but he dared not speak. He just held a finger up to his lips. He had no idea how he would protect these two from the…monsters…if they were to get in.

The tinny voice on the phone asked, “Are you there?”

The woman looked at him, not knowing what to do. He grabbed the phone from her and whispered into it, “We can’t talk. We’re hiding.”

“Help is on the–”

 He hung up on the tinny voice. He looked at the woman whose eyes were wide and unblinking. He crawled toward the window to see what was happening. The old man had lost interest in the window and was now standing in the middle of the yard, as still as the squirrel had been on the sidewalk, and he just stared out at the street. The young man was no longer there.

In the distance, the sound of sirens.

He looked over his shoulder at the woman and her little girl. The sound of help seemed to calm the woman, even if only a little bit. He saw her blink. He looked back out the window as the sirens grew louder in his ears.

Two cruisers came to a screeching halt in the middle of the street from two different directions in front of the house. The old man remained still. Four cops, two in each car, opened their doors and stood up, hands hovering over holsters. All four looked confused and taken aback by what they saw. They glanced at one another, unsure of what to do.

“Be careful! He’s sick! He’s a zombie!” dear old dad screamed from behind the window, but the ambient sounds of outside made him impossible to hear.

One of the officers spoke into the two-way radio clipped to his shoulder.

“Sir,” said another one, the most fresh-faced of the four, as he moved toward the old man, his voice hard to hear through the picture window, “we need to get you to a hospital, an EMT vehicle is on the way.”

And the old man charged. He catapulted himself at the cop who stumbled backward under his weight.

“What the fuck?” the cop yelled. “Get off me!”

 Guns were pulled from holsters, and as they were, the young landscaper ran from the house next door and tackled the cop closest to him. The two cops that remained on their feet started yelling for the landscapers to back off, but they couldn’t get shots off because they were on top of their fellow officers. The young cop managed to push the old man off of him, and stood up, hand held against his neck, and pulled his firearm to put three bullets into the old man’s half-missing chest.

“Oh my God,” said the woman. “What’s happening?”

Dear old dad didn’t answer, just stared slack-jawed out the window. The exit wounds from the bullets in the old man didn’t drip blood, but oozed a congealed version of blood mixed with a frothy white mucous-like substance. And the old man was still moving. The young cop, still holding a hand against his bite wound, began to turn around and around in the yard, and was gargling out a growl choked by the gore in his throat. For some reason he thought of those little motors attached to his Christmas lights at home. Just a sick little hum and thoughtless motors turning round and round.

 The other cop that had been tackled stood up from behind his door, and started kicking the landscaper and cursing at him. It was impossible to tell whether he had actually sustained a bite. But from behind the picture window, dear old dad could see the young landscaper’s head, and he watched as that cop smashed it to a pulp with a billy club.

“It’s fucking zombies!” yelled the cop at the top of his lungs as he continued to smash his billy club on the clearly thwarted creature. “Fucking fiction! Fucking zombie fiction!”

“Zombies!” screamed another.

“Zombies,” dear old dad said to the woman on the couch, and her brow furrowed.

And there were more sirens in the distance while the old man got on his feet despite a mutilated body. The two cops that hadn’t been attacked opened fire, two shots apiece directly into the old man’s head and his skull exploded, brains flying all over the yard, visibly tinged with an unnaturally yellowish substance.

“Please tell me what’s happening,” the woman repeated from the couch.

“The cops…” he began, but didn’t finish as three ambulances pulled up behind the cruisers. “Paramedics,” he said. “But nobody is getting out.”

The glare of the sun on the windshields made it impossible to see the ambulance drivers, but he imagined they were as horrified as he was and smartly opted to stay in their vehicles. The injured officer was now convulsing where he stood, and his counterparts all poured back into their cruisers, clearly not knowing how to handle the situation.

“Their response time has been amazing,” dear old dad said, mostly to himself.

“What do you mean?” mom asked.

“I mean they all got here so fast, as if they were…expecting this?”

“What?”

“I’m pretty sure 911 response is usually much slower.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Turn on your television,” dear old dad said.

She grabbed a remote from an end table, and hit the power button. Nothing happened.

“It isn’t working,” she said.

He flipped a light switch next to the front door to see if it worked, but again nothing happened.

“Power’s out,” he said.

“Why would the power be out?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they turned if off…maybe something else happened…”

“Mommy, I’m scared,” said the little girl.

“It’s okay, honey,” mom answered.

“I want the tree back on,” said the little girl.

“There’s no electricity,” mom explained.

“It’ll come back soon,” he added, “we’ll get your tree up and running soon.”

 He had no idea if that was true, but as a parent he had learned that lying is often the only means of comfort. He looked back out the window to see a large tractor trailer pull up in between the ambulances. He heard a helicopter flying over the house, circling. He thought maybe there was more than one.

“So I guess this window is going to be our news source,” he muttered.

The trailer was white, long, and had a few windows. A door on the side opened and a set of metal stairs were pushed out, and someone in a bio-safety suit stepped out onto the street. He couldn’t make out the face behind the plastic window in the suit’s hood. The three cops in the cruisers got back out, looked at the scientist. The person in the suit pointed at the convulsing officer in the front yard, and the three cops all turned to look at him. They lifted their guns, and every single one of them winced simultaneously as they opened fire on their friend.

 The infected officer’s head exploded in a misty red and yellow cloud, and a small chunk of hairy scalp hit the picture window. It slid slowly down the glass like one of those sticky children’s toys that you get at the joke shop. The scientist moved awkwardly toward the front yard, obviously not having spent much time in the cumbersome suit. When the scientist was closer, it was clear he was a sixty-something-year-old man with a grizzled expression he looked to wear most of the time. He scanned all the gore in the front yard, bent down for  a closer inspection, pulled a petri dish out of a small bag and took a sample of brain, whether it was landscaper or cop brain was unclear. Then he stood up and turned his head back and forth, using his whole body as the suit really had no neck. The scientist stared for a moment at one of the trees in the yard, a six foot tall ficus growing to the side of the large window. He then approached the tree, leaned in to have a look at the trunk, and put a finger out to poke at something.

“What’s happening?” the woman asked again.

 “The CDC, I guess…a CDC guy, he’s looking at your ficus. He’s…it’s a caterpillar. He’s looking at a caterpillar.”

“A caterpillar?”

“My lemon tree…I need to tell him about the squirrel.”

Dear old dad knocked on the window to get the scientist’s attention. The scientist straightened up and approached the window, squinting to see inside.

 Dear old dad raised his voice. “There was a squirrel! The squirrel bit them! Or the landscaper. The first landscaper! A squirrel bite!”

The scientist held up his hands, making it clear he couldn’t quite understand, and as he did the squirrel scampered up on top of one of the cruisers. The cops were still standing at attention by their cars, and one of them began shooing the small animal. It of course didn’t move. He used his gun to push the critter off the roof, and it lunged at his hand, burying teeth into flesh.

“Fucking squirrel!” the cop screeched.

He dropped his gun and clutched his hand, and immediately began grunting and convulsing. The squirrel scampered away. The scientist pointed at the newly infected victim of the squirrel and the remaining two cops aimed and shot him in the head just as the convulsions were becoming incredibly spastic. He crumpled to the ground, his face gone.

The scientist turned back toward the window.

“Stay away from the window!” he yelled. “Not safe!”

Then the scientist headed back to his mobile lab, and the jogger behind the window, good old dad, retreated to join the strangers on the couch.

“What are they going to do?” asked the woman, her daughter now curled up into a ball, head buried in her mother’s lap.

“I wish I knew.”

“They’ll take care of this,” she said, but her voice lacked confidence. She sounded as child-like as her little girl.

“They’ll take care of this,” dear old dad repeated, but with confidence.

Comforting lies only work if you sell them. He should have been an actor. (He was out of work anyway.)

“What do we do now?”

“I guess we wait.”

 He heard more vehicles arrive, he heard helicopters going back and forth overhead, so close the sound was almost deafening. Whenever the choppers lifted upward and quieted a bit, he could hear different people shouting back and forth. He heard a couple gunshots, and the harsh pops made him shudder. He hoped his two companions didn’t notice. His confidence was the only comfort in the room. It wasn’t his comfort, but he felt obligated. And as the din grew outside, his heart shrank within.

 He pictured his little boy, his wife, and in his financial struggles over the last few years he had wished for his own death so many times; the one major expense he had maintained despite everything since losing his job was life insurance payments. If he died, his family would be taken care of, and as an unemployed man he was worth much more dead than alive. Usually his death wish wasn’t genuine, but sometimes…sometimes he really meant it, the pressure of money crushing his will to live. But here, on this couch with the neighborhood falling apart around him, he realized how much he didn’t want to die, how much he just wanted to sit around the plastic tree with the loud spinning ornaments, wanted to have an arm around Marg while watching little Ben tearing open his presents. He realized he just didn’t give a flying fuck about money. Not anymore. He’d rather be alive and in their presence than leave them alone but financially solvent. And maybe that was pure selfishness. He didn’t care. He wanted to be with them. He wanted to be the husband. He wanted to be dad. He needed to get to them.

He needed to get to them right away.

“I need to get out of here,” he said, “I need to get to my family.”

The drone of a helicopter overhead grew alarmingly loud.

“Please don’t go,” yelled the woman, her daughter starting to cry. “You can’t go.”

Suddenly, there was a huge smack against the roof. It sounded like some kind of giant monster had slapped the house. Then he could hear something…unfurling. And suddenly the room was steeped in shadow.

He got up and moved for the window.

“He said stay away from the window! It’s not safe!”

But dear old dad didn’t stop. He went right to the giant window, the only place he had been able to turn to for his news updates, the only place he had been able to at all appraise his bizarre situation. But when he got there, he only saw white and blue. There was a wall of canvas blocking the goings on outside.

“Shit,” he said and rushed to unlock and open the front door.

 “What the hell are your doing?” the woman asked, jumping up from the couch.

The little girl gagged on a sob before yelling, “Mommy!”

He swung the door open to reveal more blue and white canvas.

“What is happening?” mommy asked, voice quivering.

“They tented the house.”

“You mean like for termites?”

“Yeah.”

“But–”

“They’re going to gas the house.”

“With us inside!”

“Yeah.”

He paused for a moment, then went to the little girl and picked her up. This time she didn’t struggle, she didn’t scream. She buried her head in his chest. He grabbed the woman by the hand.

“We’re getting out of here.”

Another, but all new, thundering noise filled his ears, so loud they immediately started ringing. The house shook so violently the woman fell to the floor. Still holding her hand, he yanked her to her feet, and suddenly the three of them were standing in front of the picture window again. What they saw seemed to come in ultra-slow motion.

In truth, it lasted less than a second.

A giant hole was cut into the canvas by what looked like giant fan blades. A helicopter, nose pointed to the ground and completely out of control, flew into the front of the house.

Last thing dear old dad saw was that big, beautiful picture window that once looked out onto a peaceful neighborhood shatter into a million pieces. The last thing he heard was the whimper of a little girl somehow louder than the explosion of fire furiously flashing around him. The last thing he felt was a woman whose name he had never thought to ask for squeezing his hand.

She squeezed so hard she broke his middle finger.

Let me know what you think!

Well, the season is upon us. And I know that your work is for the children. But I wanted to write you a letter, anyway. And I want to write a letter just like the kids get to, I want to tell you what I want for Christmas. But before I do, let me say a profound thanks. Thanks for always being there, making my young holiday seasons such a magical time, filled with anticipation and excitement and bright imagination. And thank your elf staff and reindeer for all the lessons they have imparted about the joy of giving and holiday cheer. I of course have certain intellectual problems with the religious element of your holiday, and I grapple with it every year, but I prefer to think of you as nondenominational, open to all regardless of personal beliefs. Because the joy you see in a child’s eyes on Christmas morning makes all spiritual debates about dogma completely irrelevant. It’s just the joy. So thank you so much for continuing your quest to bring all children some kind of happiness.

Also please understand that I don’t want you to fulfill my wish list until all the children are taken care of, and all those less fortunate than me of whom I realize there is a copious amount, but…if you have time. (And I hope I used “whom” correctly in that last sentence, but quite frankly I’ve always found the who/whom thing confusing.) All I’m saying is, if you have time, I would like my wishes granted. And I know this is the season of giving, and I will give all I can to those that I can give to, but I would like to receive as well. Nothing to crazy, mind you, it feels like a reasonable wish list. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that you (and Lady Luck, perhaps) are the only one who can give me what I want. And I know that it is simply what I want. To define my wishes as “needs” would be selfish, although I’m pretty sure most of the people who live in my tax bracket do consider what I’m about to ask for as “needs.”

You see, I need to replace my drain pipes. You know, that go to the sewer. They are old and are starting to back up on a regular basis. The price tag, from the lowest bidder, is $3600. This probably doesn’t seem like a lot of money to some, but I have my mortgage and all my monthly bills, and I don’t have anything extra. I certainly don’t want you to jam a bunch of cash in my stocking, because mere charity isn’t exactly what I’m after here. I would like to at least feel that I’ve earned those drain pipes. So…is there any way you can get me a job? Any job would be good, but if there is any way you could make it a steady gig, that would be a true dream come true. The trickle down economic theory isn’t working for me these days. And I know my chosen profession is a little bit trickier than most of the 99%, as I am an actor. If the best I can get is a commercial or two, I will gladly take it with a smile and grateful handshake. But I got into show business to work, and if I had a place to do it with any degree of regularity, that would be great. Because I am an actor and I want to act. All the time. I certainly didn’t get into it to lead some kind of lavish movie star lifestyle, but I would like to feel less stressed about how I might pay for drain pipes (and my house needs new windows because they are all cracked, and it also needs an exterior paint job and the garage needs a new door. My wife, I’m sure, would appreciate remodeling the bathrooms and kitchen as they are in a rather poor state. And really, if I can just get those things, I will feel satisfied, even if when I bought the house I dreamt of converting the garage into a man cave and adding on to the front of the house to create a little more room in which to move around.) I guess what I’m saying is I’d like to do at least slightly better than simply breaking even all the time.

I know I’m not special. I know I’m not better than anyone else. But letters to you, Santa, are about dreams, and these are mine. To work a lot, and to feel financially comfortable, this is my dream. And please remember that I want the children and completely downtrodden to come first. Food and shelter for all, if you can. But if you manage to get all that done this Christmas, and somehow have even a little time left over, could you please? Just a job for old Todd, here. Just a job.

Lots of love, Santa, and have a Merry Christmas. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.

Forever your believer and champion, Todd.

But you see, despite this, I am…well, I guess you would call it a “closet dancer.” When I was a kid, my dad (also a lover of music and dancing) taught my sister, my brother, and me how to do the “Hand Jive.” It’s a dance, very simple, mostly about hand movements. Sort of a step up from pat-a-cake. Johnny Otis recorded a song called “Willie and the Hand Jive” which was about a guy named Willie rising to fame just because he likes doing the Hand Jive so much. My dad taught us how to do it using Eric Clapton’s cover of the song, which was a decidedly more mellow take on the tune, slower tempo and maybe just a little stoned. First you shuffle open hand over open hand; then you bump your fists together, top to bottom and then bottom to top; then you waggle your thumbs in the air, one at a time while holding one elbow with the hand that isn’t wagging a thumb; then you do this crazy thing that starts with your hands on your knees and then you switch your hands back and forth on your knees which makes your arms cross and that looked like some crazy kind of magic to me as a kid. And of course, once you’ve gone through the pattern once, you do it all again and again until the song fades out. And we all did it together, as a family. And it was just a good time. A dad and his kids letting loose with a silly little dance that he grew up with. And sometimes mom would join, and sometimes she’d just stand in the door way and watch, whenever we did our Hand Jive sessions. If anyone was ever feeling sad about something, dad would corral us in the living room for a bit of the Hand Jive. And it worked every time. It always made us feel better.

So, if you ask me to come to your dance party, I won’t. I don’t like being laughed at. But know I wish I could. And if you happen by my house at just the right time, and you can see into my living room or into my backyard, you might just catch me. (But don’t let me catch you, you peeping tom pervert.) Because whenever I feel like I can’t push back against the weight of the world, whenever I can’t see my way out of a predicament, whenever I’m just plain glum about the way society works, I put on that Clapton track and have at it.

Because the Hand Jive still makes me feel better. Damn you giggling teenagers all to hell.

Thanks, Dad.

I moved to Los Angeles in my twenties with my college roommate and good old buddy Andy Barth, a sweet and kind man who was never very good at cleaning up after himself. We drove across country in his VW Rabbit (it was a miracle the old jalopy made it all the way.) Neither of us had ever been to the city before, we knew only a handful of people, and the only thing we came with was our dreams of being actors and working in the entertainment industry. It’s a classic American story, really. The culture shock was almost immediate, in that we were coming from our college years in New York City, which is a proper city as opposed to the sprawling suburb of nothing that is Los Angeles. (We drove right past downtown thinking it was just the beginning of the city, and we became very confused when we were suddenly at the ocean and had seen nothing but apartment buildings and fast food chains. As opposed to the jungle of tall buildings we took to mean you were in a “city.”) We drove out at the end of October. By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, we had an apartment that featured two plastic chairs and a television that got only one channel mounted gracefully on the top of a pile of cardboard boxes. We were both still sleeping on the floor. Needless to say, we certainly had no money to fly back home for a proper family Thanksgiving. But that was okay. It was a sacrifice we were more than willing to make in service of our burgeoning thespian careers.

So, what to do? We had a little money, and by a “little money” I mean we had some credit cards with intensely low spending limits. So how do two single guys celebrate their first Thanksgiving in the city of their dreams? Well, we had heard of this place called “Malibu” which was often prominently featured in eighties titty movies, and we like titties, so we thought we’d try to find a restaurant to serve us a small feast in the ultra-rich beach town where we were sure we might see some titties. We were still stumbling through figuring out the layout of the city, and leaving from out apartment in Studio City we meandered through freeway exchanges and canyon roads before we finally got to the legendary beachfront area known for its money and boobs. We drove up and down the PCH, trying to find a restaurant open for business. But because most rich towns have rich people with their rich mansions filled with their rich families, all of Malibu was closed. There was nothing open, not even a damn taco stand. So we kept moving south on the PCH, until we were in Santa Monica and suddenly turned toward Los Angeles proper. We drove and drove and drove, looking for a place to eat, and everything was either closed or a fast food chain (and fast food seemed just too sad for the holiday, even for us.)

We had no idea where we were, but over the years I’ve come to realize that we weren’t too far from the LAX airport. We were now both starving, and driving down some dusty boulevard filled with dilapidated apartment buildings and auto body shops. We both agreed that no matter what place we saw next that served food and was open for the holiday, we would go into, even if it was goddamn McDonald’s because holy shit, we needed to eat. Just as the agreement was met, we happened upon a tavern that boasted “Thanksgiving Dinner!” It was an old-looking place, with a dirty white stucco exterior framed by dark wood beams that supported nothing, but were there to make it look rustic. The inside of the place was something out of the Midwest, dim lighting and red carpets and booths made out of stained wood. The waitresses were all career servers, most looking to be well into their sixties. It was perfect.

So we sat at a small booth, ordered some beers and our Thanksgiving dinners. And there we sat and ate and drank, with minimal conversation because when you have been roommates with someone for several years and driven across country together, there is very little left to talk about anymore. The food was pretty bland, but it at least has all the nostalgic Thanksgiving dishes, turkey with gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and of course bread stuffing. We pretty much wolfed it down we were so hungry from our failed expedition to titty town. And while the whole ordeal, two delusional broke guys putting a lousy dinner on credit cards because they couldn’t get to their families, might seem sad, it actually wasn’t.

Sure, we were a bit lonely and certainly nervous about the future and whether or not we had made a good choice in running down our dreams. But there was something coloring the whole day, the whole strange series of events, that made it very homey and exciting. Hope. Faith. Belief in ourselves, belief in our dreams, belief in the country that has always promised better lives for all. I know now that we were certainly young and foolish, as the old and wise might say. But if I could go back and relive that Thanksgiving in that dim place with my old buddy, I would and I wouldn’t change a thing. Because we weren’t just dining on bland food. We were dining out on the Technicolor wonder of an adventure which at the time, reality be damned, could only have a happy ending.

And that day is certainly worth giving thanks for. Happy November, folks. Over and out.

And then came the opossums. Or possums, I guess, although some of my research has suggested that these are names for two slightly different animals. But it’s the internet, so my incredibly light research was probably misleading. What is absolutely true however, is that there was one in my garage. I clean my garage annually, usually when work has gotten so slow I can’t figure out what to do with myself anymore (writing and podcasting for my own creative fulfillment and such a small audience only runs so far…please don’t take that the wrong way.) Also, it was my son’s sixth birthday so we had ordered a bunk bed for him because he’s outgrown his toddler bed. I needed to clear the clutter from the garage to create workspace to unpack the pieces of the bed and start putting it together. I was pulling a bunch of old drywall that I had leaned up against the wall in the corner on the off-chance that I might use it someday, and out of nowhere I saw this giant rat-tail on my shoe. I jumped back and screeched because I am very brave. I steeled myself and pulled everything else out of that corner of the garage to reveal what I thought was a large opossum. (I came to learn that it was only a baby, mom was probably a good twenty pounds or more.) I thought if I could clear its hiding places, I could chase it from the garage. But once all the clutter was in my driveway, and it was just me and the big rodent in there, he made it clear that he wasn’t going to leave. In fact, he went to sleep. I thought he might be “playing possum” as they say, but every time I made loud noises in an attempt to chase him away, he would open his eyes and look at me like I was an asshole, and then go back to sleep. (If he had been actually “playing possum” he wouldn’t have woken up, he would have genuinely seemed dead. You see, another thing I came to learn is that when an opossum is terrified, it actually has a mini-stroke and all its organs shut down so when a would-be attacker sniffs at it, it doesn’t smell yummy.) This opossum apparently knew I had no interest in eating it, and really liked sleeping in the bed of leaves it had created in the corner. So, I took to the phone, trying to find someone to come and take it away. I came to learn that most exterminators don’t deal in opossums, and the ones that do use traps and charge you three hundred or more dollars for the service. I had multiple conversations with people, explaining that there was no need to set traps because I could fucking point at the damn animal! But I finally found one of five companies in the greater Los Angeles area that would actually capture the thing with one of those triggered dog catcher poles with the neck loop on the end. He charged the much smaller fee of one-hundred fifty bucks for his work. He came and grabbed it (took three whole minutes) and put it in the back of the truck. He said he could set some traps if I wanted, since I was also paying for the standard two-week trapping contract, but he doubted there would be any more because they tend to hang alone (unless they are part of a litter of babies, in which case they sometimes stay together until older.) I asked him how he got into the garage, and he pointed out the three-quarter inch gap at the bottom of the door on the side of the detached garage. Given how fat they were, my first reaction was, “How the hell?” He then explained that opossums and raccoons can flatten their rib cages and slide into tight spaces. (Oh. Nice.) In any event, he took it away in his truck. And he told me to put a bunch of mothballs in the garage because the smell would drive any other would-be freeloaders away. Problem solved. Unless you count the money I didn’t have that I used to pay for it.

But then. The next night my house alarm went off in the middle of the night. Thinking there was a burglar in the house, my wife and I lit into a panic, the alarm company on the phone. The alarm that was triggered was a motion sensor in the garage. Now, a smart person would have had them send the police to investigate in case there was some kind of violent felon snooping around in the garage, but if it was another opossum in the garage, we would be charged one hundred bucks for a false alarm. So, in a half asleep daze, I went out and slowly opened the door on the side of the garage. I gingerly reached into the darkness and flipped on the light. There, right at my feet, was another goddamn opossum. He just looked at me. Being a hero, I screamed, turned on my heels, and ran back into the house. Luckily I was still under contract with the animal trapper, so now we have traps set. Four days into the contract, we’ve trapped two more opossums. Trick is, the trapper charges an additional sixty bucks for each animal he takes away. Yeah. So all my unemployment insurance is going into opossums.

And when I finally got to unpack my son’s new bunk bed parts, the largest and most important piece was broken because all affordable furniture is made with particle board now and it’s pretty much a guarantee that something will break in shipping. So my son did not get his big birthday present on time, and currently he still hasn’t got it because it takes forever to get replacement parts.

But if I was that young kid who loved some older guy’s acting so much and I had regular role on a series, none of this would matter. It would just be a pesky set of homeowner’s expenses as opposed to building blocks to nerve-wracking credit debt. I heard the great actor Brian Cranston on a podcast, a couple of podcasts actually, in which he said the main thing an actor needs to be successful are huge strokes of good luck.

When’s mine coming? I want to look back on the opossum days and laugh.

And of course different actors have different strengths. Some are great at memorizing lines and making it their own. Some are great at improvisation. Some are great at drama. Some are great in comedy. Some can do all of the above. Some know how to use the space of a stage properly. Some know how to hit their marks perfectly in the highly technical world of filmed entertainment. Some are simply incredibly easy on the eye. Truth is, even the weakest actors can still have an amazing charisma that carries them through.

In the world of commercial acting, auditions usually involve working with other actors (theatrical auditions tend to be just you and the casting director or producers, no other actors in the room.) And quite often you can get stuck working with actors who haven’t trained or just plain haven’t figured out how to do it well. (And people can always have off days, I’m guilty of that myself.) When you are in a room with an actor who is making a mighty mess of things, your work gets lost. You are lumped in with the bad audition, even if you weren’t so bad yourself. This can be true with movies and television as well, if you are a good performer in a smaller role but the leads are lousy and the project is lousy, then you are associated with the negativity. You see what I’m saying? You could be perfect for a part in a commercial, but if you are in the room with a stilted actor who trips all over the lines, you aren’t going to be remembered. And although according to the Screen Actors Guild it is against the rules for casting directors and producers to ask you to improvise in an audition (a lot of actors have come up with lines in auditions that were used in commercials even though they weren’t hired to work on the commercials,) improvisation is a huge part of commercial auditions. It’s actually pretty rare when you hear someone say, “Please stick to what’s written.” You usually hear, “Make it your own,” or “Play around with the dialogue,” which is casting director code for “Improvise!” (Casting directors have a lot of codes in order to keep from getting sued. For example, “Make it more urban,” is something an African-American actor might hear if they want a stereotyped performance. “Make it more fun,” means “Act more stereotypically gay.” And there are the different codes to let you know you did a bad job like “nice work” or “great job” or “thanks for coming in.” Recently I heard a new one, “It was great to reconnect with you,” which I’m pretty sure means, “I remember when I used to bring you in a lot when you were young but now you are all old and quite frankly I don’t understand why you haven’t quit by now.”)

If you have to improvise in an audition, it really helps to have someone who can improvise as well. In my category, or “type,” I wind up improvising with a lot of funny character guys so it’s usually pretty fun. But sometimes I still get stuck with someone who has never auditioned before and it is hard to “yes, and” somebody if they are just staring blankly at you. Currently I go out for dad characters, almost exclusively actually. I wind up working with a lot of children. I don’t expect children to be great actors, but I would suggest to all the stage moms and dads out there that if you are pushing your kid to be in commercials (and yes, I know a few kids really want to do it, but in general when stage parents say that is their reason for carting their kids around to auditions it is complete bullshit, they just want more money or don’t want to have to come up with college tuition money themselves) then enroll your small child in some classes. They have acting classes for kids. It should be fun and not a highly pressurized environment for learning skills that will help you “make it” but  if you have a little professional, then dammit get them some tools. I had an audition this week, a call-back in front of producers, agency people, and the director, and I was paired with this little girl, cute as a button. She had red hair as I do, and that’s why we were put together as father and daughter. (Smartly, I never mention the scientific realities of recessive genes in the audition room.) They hadn’t written any dialogue, but the entire audition was dependent on the little girl doing all the talking. I was there to react. So when she just stood there and stared at me, her cute little seven-year-old face mostly blank except for the panicked terror in her eyes, I suddenly became the acting babysitter. The audition became about getting from one end to the other as professionally as possible, because there was no way I was going to get the part if the girl they paired me with couldn’t improvise.

Of course I harbor no ill-will toward this sweet little girl. And even if she had been an adult, I still would have politely said goodbye and good job and all that because I learned long ago that there is no point in telling someone how he or she just screwed me over because he or she came to the world of acting completely unprepared. (I think, despite all that everyone knows about how tough show business is, a lot of actors get into it because they think they are “special” and require no education whatsoever to be so damn special.) But here in blog world I can say, “I JUST SPENT NINETY MINUTES IN TRAFFIC AND SAT IN A WAITING ROOM FOR AN HOUR FOR NO DISCERNIBLE REASON BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING.” In the case of the little girl, it really isn’t fair to ask such a young child to improvise given that is a skill that takes years to develop properly, so despite all the wasted time I don’t blame her. But I will blame her mother for not taking her to some classes. Because you know what? I SPENT NINETY MINUTES IN TRAFFIC AND SAT IN A WAITING ROOM FOR NO DISCERNIBLE REASON BECAUSE SOME STRANGER WITH A CUTE DAUGHTER HAS NO PROBLEM PUSHING HER KID INTO A ROOM COMPLETELY BLIND TO HOW THINGS ARE DONE AND NOW THERE IS NO WAY I’LL GET THIS JOB THAT I DESPERATELY NEED IN ORDER TO SUPPORT MY OWN FAMILY!

There. Now at least I feel a little better.

I of course welcome anyone to say whatever they want about our opinions, and we can certainly be harsh with the movies we watch. So it’s only fair that people can be harsh with us. However, thoughtless comments and brazen insults don’t make a case for your opinions and feelings, which is something that we actually do even though it comes from the inside of a car without much thought. We don’t just scream, “This sucks.” We scream, “This sucks and here is why!” Any opinion that comes without reason is just knee-jerk bullshit. And insulting someone you don’t agree with is fine and dandy, and this is a free country, but you kind of come off like a reactionary idiot when you do such things. (I know, because when I was a kid I used to behave just the same way…and then I grew up. I mean, I’m still an immature schlub who thinks he is better than everyone else, but at least I take the time to think things through at least for a few minutes before I run around insulting people.) And I can only speak for myself when I say that yes, I am not as successful in my chosen field as I’d like to be, but the fact that I work at all puts me head and shoulders about anyone who is still mopping floors and living with mem-mem and pep-pep while dreaming of one day being the big star he or she most certainly deserves to be. Beyond that, just because I didn’t like the movie Drive doesn’t mean I don’t respect the work. I just didn’t like the outcome. And if what I think really bothers the wealthy people at the forefront of that picture’s making, I am very sorry. Hopefully knowing that you got my fourteen bucks to see it will help you sleep a little better at night.

I’m at odds with myself all the time given that I am loud about my cinematic opinions and I am also someone who works hard to be a part of the entertainment industry. I’m sure it will all come back to bite me in the ass. But I think more intelligent people will at least realize it comes out of a place of passion for the medium…I mean, my entire life is built on childhood dreams fueled by the movies. And I certainly know how much it hurts when someone doesn’t like your work. This is why I try to react to these movies with at least a little reservation and refrain from saying things like, “Fuck this piece of shit and everyone involved should die!” Unless of course it’s something Uwe Boll made. (Just kidding. I don’t think everyone in Uwe Boll movies should die. They should probably be locked up for a while, though.) I personally have received my fair share of terrible reviews, including a recent post on my YouTube channel in response to one of these silly videos I make which simply said, “Hey, you suck.” And you know what? It isn’t that there is some random person out there who hides behind a fake name thinks I suck that bothers me. What bothers me is I don’t know why. Because maybe this person has a really good reason why he thinks I suck, and if I knew what it was then a flaw that I can struggle to change might be illuminated.

In any event, it’s nice to know that people are listening and get riled up. That is exciting. Oh, and to that YouTube guy who thinks I suck: fuck you, you dick.

Here’s a video companion piece: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdcRwQY-pDM

I have been at parties where people have been on coke before, but I never really spent a lot of time talking to them. I just knew it was there. Personally, I have never had the desire to do cocaine, or any hard drugs really, and that may be because I had it drummed into my head as a kid that drugs were evil (congrats, parents and school system in Massachusetts) but given its availability and my natural proclivity for being naughty, I’d say it’s more a personality thing. Just don’t want that shit in my system, there’s plenty of poison in there already. But a lot of actors, writers, rock stars, painters, and other artist types are known to indulge in such activities. This is often attributed to personality as well, artists tend to have…maladjustment problems, I guess? I tend to think it’s more an issue of too much time on their hands, because any artist that isn’t filling the non-paying hours with art that garners no reward (except itself) gets really, really bored. Drugs are definitely not boring. For the user, that is.

That said, I had an experience the other weekend that made me entirely aware of why doing cocaine is idiotic. My wife had a few friends over from her rock band (she is a back-up singer) to shoot the shit and have some drinks on our patio on a hot summer night. It was around midnight, and I thought we were winding down so I could get some goddamn sleep, but suddenly my wife pulled me aside.

“We’ve got to talk,” she said. And it sounded like the kind of thing I would hear at a junior high party when I was a kid, some friend who just had to tell me the latest gossip. But then she apologized. “I’m really sorry about this, I had no idea it was happening until it was happening…”

One of these rockers had called his dealer, and suddenly there was cocaine at my house. And three of the rockers were partaking. My wife was genuinely apologetic for her friends’ behaviour, and I knew it was sort of out her hands due to the rather secretive nature of the cocaine’s arrival. I was extremely pissed off that nobody had asked my permission given that it was my house and my kid was asleep in his bedroom, and I do not want coke-heads near him. No, I don’t think these people would have bothered my son, but it just felt…well, like I was suddenly a terrible parent for having them around. I thought about kicking everyone the fuck out, but then my ability to reason kicked in, and I remembered that if I sent these high people away, anything that happened on the road I could be liable for. So, in that instant, I became the cocaine babysitter.

Dear cocaine users, please understand that no matter how awesome you feel when under the influence of your drug of choice, you should understand something: YOU ARE SO FUCKING ANNOYING. I’m sure talking to someone on cocaine is an absolute pleasure to someone else on cocaine, but if you happen to be the cocaine babysitter, some person incessantly talking about nothing at high-speed in your face is the worst kind of drudgery imaginable. And the people from my wife’s band are genuinely wonderful, intelligent people who are normally a lot of fun to talk to. But cocaine makes everyone think that every thing he or she says is marvelously fascinating and beyond that, every single one of those marvelously fascinating things needs to be said before the drug wears off. But we all have these hum-drum aspects of our lives that only we care about, and when sober we usually take the time to edit these things out of conversation. But on coke, the hum-drum because epically important. And when three in the morning rolls around and your cocaine babysitter just wants to go to sleep, your ten minute monologue about how crazy your last trip to the local 7-11 is an abomination. Really. Never mind that doing cocaine puts your heart in jeopardy of exploding. The most important thing to remember before you start snorting is just how irritating you are about to become.

So. No more coke at my house. Please.

This is just your basic, run-of-the-mill behind-the-scenes type of deal here. And it isn’t one of my usual horror stories, just to warn you. It won’t be that funny or sardonic. Because once in a while, even a guy like me has a good show biz story. And why shouldn’t I, dammit?

First of all I need to mention that due to a lack of funds, my son went to no daycare or camps during his summer break. My wife taught summer school to make ends meet, so I was stay-at-home dad, except that I have this bit-player acting career I have to maintain. (And no, I never intended to be a bit player for so long, doing small guest star roles and commercials for fifteen years. Am I grateful? Yeah, I guess, sure. To make any kind of living as an actor is some kind of miracle, or so I’m told.) Sometimes I would be able to wrangle a playdate for my son and leave him at a friend’s house for a few hours while I drove over the hill to read a line or two or sometimes even seven for a casting director or producers or whoever. But when I couldn’t work that out (and yes, I would ask my wife to help with logistics and she would usually be helpful although sometimes she didn’t want to deal with my scheduling problems because she had her own) I would have to take him with me. He is pretty good with auditions, and will sit quietly and watch in the room while I do my thing, and he usually tells me what he thought was really funny about my performances. Until the other day, all he saw me audition for was commercials. Commercial casting folk are very understanding about parents bringing their kids with them because most commercial actors are scrappers and struggling to get by and don’t have nannies and staff members on hand like a lot of more successful actors. So generally I try to find him somewhere else for him to be when I have a theatrical audition.

But then last Tuesday, a day I thought free of appointments, I got a call at 9:15 in the morning asking that I get to an audition for a one-day guest star on a half hour comedy. (It’s called “The Exes” and will air on TVLand this fall.) Apparently, the writers were having a hard time making this particular scene funny, and in a last-minute rewrite added a stranger into the scene to give it comedic punch. This was the part I was auditioning for. But I had my son, and there wasn’t anywhere near enough time for me to get ready, prepare the sides, find somewhere for him to hang out, and get to the audition on time. The other catch was that the job shot that afternoon, so if I got the part I would actually stay on the lot right after the audition and go to work. I tried to wrangle it all in my head for a few minutes, and finally had to say to my agent that there was no way I could do it unless they were willing to let me bring my boy along. My agent called the casting director, and a few minutes later called me and said that they would try to work something out if I got the job.

So I got showered up and dressed and looked over the sides (not enough prep time, really, but it was all I could do) and got my son’s stuff together and got him in the car and got to the audition right on time. There were maybe seven other last-minute guys auditioning for the role (I wonder how many more just couldn’t make it.) My son accompanied me into the room for my first read, sat quietly and dutifully on the couch (impressive for a five-year-old, I think,) and I did the scene, not thinking about the cursing in the last line (nothing hardcore, it is commercial television, after all) and when I was done, the casting director apologized to him for the bad language. I explained that he is very good about not using bad language as my wife and I have taught him that it can be offensive to some people. Of course, I couldn’t help but think that everyone in the room must think I am a shitty parent for exposing him to such nastiness.

Anyway, we then went down to the waiting room while they read more guys, my son played Angry Birds on my iPhone, and I stared blankly into space secretly hoping that I wouldn’t get the job because I didn’t want to have to hassle with a five-year-old’s antsiness when we would surely be waiting around in a tiny room for hours on end until I was needed on set. After all the actors had read, the casting director came out to ask just three of us to stay (which is incredibly awkward, given that the rejection happens face-to-face, not customary in Hollywood, but the time crunch made it the only way to go.) The casting director was very sweet with the guys that didn’t make the first cut. And to my rather odd dismay, I was one of the final three. And the callback was happening right away, producers were on their way to the office to see the final candidates. We waited long enough that I made friendly with the other two guys, and they offered to hang out with the child while I went in for my next read. My son was very quiet and happily lost in his video game, so he appeared the angel. It’s a different thing when your kid is bouncing off the walls. Nobody wants to deal with that.

I did my read, got four or five adjustments, and then left the room. I knew when they gave me so much direction that I would get the job. Worst thing an actor can hear is, “Great work!” after doing it only once. If you get a whole mess of notes that make it clear that your first take on the material was completely wrong, it means that they like you and want to work with you and make you work for the role. Doesn’t matter how good or bad you are, really, but if they like you they will make you work. So I waited in the room with the three guys, knowing the job was mine, but secretly hoping I was wrong because the stress of doing my best possible work while having my focus split between the project and being a dad was daunting. The casting director came out and said they had to wait for network approval, which basically means all the suits that can’t be bothered to show up to the casting session still want to throw in their two cents, which even with such a small part is generally what happens when a show is brand new, hasn’t hit the air yet, but is very well liked. She didn’t want to make us wait in the dingy waiting room for an hour, so she asked us to leave the lot, but stay nearby and wait for the call. Blah.

So I took my son to a diner for lunch. We had some eggs. I was really too nervous to eat, which I thought strange given that I don’t get all that nervous anymore in regards to small jobs like this. But the added element of being a responsible parent was pushing me over the edge. I realize that I am an overly nervous person, so anything outside of my comfort zone terrifies me. Of course, maybe the very fact that I was in that state got me out of my own way and made me turn in good work in the audition. If it had been different? Well, who knows. Anyway, I had just told my son that he could have a piece of pie when the call came in, and I was the guy, and I had to get to set right away. While he started to whine about the canceled pie, when I explained to him that I needed him to be patient and strong for daddy and also that I would introduce him to a bevy of free treats available via the thing called “craft services,” he simmered down and cooperated.

Now, I’ve seen plenty of television star mommies and daddies with their kids on set, but I’ve never seen a bit player dragging a kid into the strange world of show making. The second we got to the lot, we were ushered onto a golf cart and driven to the set for a rehearsal. It dawned on me that my son had never ridden a golf cart before, and when I looked at his face (he was sitting on my lap) he was clearly in seventh heaven. When we got into the soundstage, me explaining everything that was happening as it was happening so he wouldn’t be terrified, they had a director’s chair waiting just for him (something that rarely happens to me on jobs like this, but clearly they were communicating to each other that I had a kid in tow.) Everyone was super-welcoming to him (and me) and three very cute actresses who had heard he was on the set immediately descended upon him and wanted to take him to craft services. I didn’t want him out of my sight, so I politely thanked them and asked if they wouldn’t mind waiting until after the rehearsal to take him to the snack wonderland. He is a charmer, and well-behaved, so everyone seemed to take to him. He was overwhelmed, so he kept his eyes on me, and I checked in with him every couple of minutes to make sure he knew that I wasn’t getting lost in my work. He was number one.

He had never seen me work before, so in that I got a gift. He got to see the cameras and the sets and the television stars and his dad standing in the midst of it all. During the rehearsal three different people apologized to me after saying “fuck” after a screw up. I told them the same thing that I did the casting director, and I don’t know that my little fella even noticed the bad language. (We never make a big deal out of bad words in movies we see at home or when friends let them slip, and I think the lack of power we give those words keeps him from caring about them.) And after, my son told me how funny he thought I was. The director did, too, actually, but while in any other situation that would have been important, the only opinion I cared about was the kid’s. In any event, one of the actresses escorted us to the snack area, and my son got an ice cream that he decided he didn’t like, so the actress threw it out and got him another one (which he thought was awesome, because his parents never would have done such a thing…because we pay for only one ice cream, and in Craft Service Land, it is all magically free.)

We then hung out in my dressing room for a couple of hours, and he couldn’t play video games because my phone battery was dying, and he started bouncing off the walls. There was a television, but they didn’t have any kids channels so he was stuck watching “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader” or whatever that show is called which bored him to tears. And I’m trying to learn my lines while he is complaining about the commercials which he never sees because we stream all his shows from Netflix and he doesn’t usually have to hassle with him. Trying to explain to him the antiquated concept of “live television” proved a pointless endeavor. Eventually I was brought into a wardrobe fitting, and I had to tell him what “wardrobe” was eighteen times before it finally sunk in. He said wardrobe fittings were more boring than that game show with children, and I agreed. The wardrobe stylist was very helpful in talking to him, but he started getting antsy again and was spinning around on one of those rotating office chairs when he pinched his hand between one of the chair arms and a desk. He cried. I ran out of the changing area in my skivvies to make sure he was all right and calm him down. When you are a parent, all modesty flies out the window.

He was okay, and the wardrobe fitting was mercifully brief, and a few minutes later my wife came to the lot to take him home. I told her about the day, and said our son had done quite well and everyone liked him, and I mentioned that at one point he was sitting on his director’s chair surrounded by TV stars who were all charmed by his presence. He said, “Well, mom, they’re all actually all my friends now. I call them friends.” Ain’t that sweet?

Hours later, my scene was shot and the day was over. Very stressful, but ultimately a great experience. For me. And I imagine for him as well.

The next day, I had to take him to another audition, this one for a commercial. When I got out he asked, “So are we going to work now?” I explained to him that it usually didn’t work that way. But I wished we were going to work.

I really wished we were.