Transaction Spillover: Hollywood Runaway at 16
This story is a fictionalized account of a personal experience. It is the second part of an untitled, work-in-progress series. Here is a link to the first story of the unnamed collection.
My mom recently sent me a series of emails. The first one was short — thank God — its comical desperation and feigned urgency conveyed through her abuse of the caps lock key:
Lita,
I REALLY NEED TO TALK TO YOU SOON…..PLEASE CALL ME…. MISS YOU GUYS!
Mom
She had made several attempts to call me the past few weeks prior to sending the email. She never left any voicemails. If there was an emergency, why wouldn’t she call me and leave me a voicemail — or better yet, include details of the emergency in the email? My first reaction was that, maybe, she was trying to manipulate me. I wasn’t angry, of course. I had long ago accepted my mother’s manipulative nature. I was, however, insulted and annoyed that she believed me to be so supremely stupid to fall for her thinly veiled attempt to manipulate me!
But then I had second thoughts. I entertained the idea that my mother may have been telling the truth. She is very peculiar, after all. She was once admitted to the hospital and required a 2-unit blood transfusion. Apparently, she had been “menstruating” for eight weeks, and she thought it was perfectly normal. This is a 46-year-old woman we’re talking about here. She’s definitely been menstruating for more than half her lifetime. In other words, she’s a seasoned period pro. I don’t know why she would ever believe that menstruating for eight weeks, under any circumstance, could be construed as even remotely “normal”. I found it unbelievably confusing and bizarre. People can be so unbelievably confusing and bizarre. So, perhaps it didn’t occur to my mother that she should have included details about the emergency in the email.
I turned towards my husband, who was lounging beside me on the bed where I sat upright with my laptop.
“How should I respond to her email?” I asked.
His face was buried in a book — Mill’s Utilitarianism — his irresistible copper curls peeking up from behind the book cover. See, my husband and I, we’re kindred spirits in this respect. We delve into what we despise. We study what we hate. Know your enemies and all that jazz. Presently, he hated utilitarianism.
“I don’t know,” he responded monotonously.
Of course. Of course, he wouldn’t know, I silently lamented. I didn’t think he’d give me a real answer, anyway. My husband rivals Hamlet in indecisiveness and inaction. I turned my attention back to my screen, typed out, “What is the emergency?” and hit Send.
I like my husband. He’s a cool guy. He’s magnificent in the sack. One time on Facebook, a friend posted a question: what movie best describes your love life? Anaconda was my reply.
We’ve been together for 11 years, married for the past nine. We met when he and I were 17 and 16, respectively. His friend, Allen, had invited a mutual friend, Jana, to take part of a retreat that he had to plan with two other friends — my husband and a fellow senior named Cole. Allen, Cole, and my husband attended a Jesuit high school together in the heart of Los Angeles, and tradition demanded that they organize a retreat for the newly admitted freshmen.
Years later, Allen went on to marry my husband’s sister, Myra. I guess that makes Allen and I technically in-laws. Presently, Myra and Allen live in New York, in the hipster enclave of Brooklyn. We aren’t on speaking terms. She is training with some dance company, and he is employed with NYU’s School of Law. Last I heard, he was priming to get his master’s in public policy.
Degrees in public policy are jokes. People who study public policy are taught enough political philosophy and economic theory that they believe they know what they are doing, but aren’t taught nearly enough to know that what they are doing is wrong. Allen is a secular humanist. Cole, on the other hand, was a Catholic communist. He graduated from law school last year. In the middle of law school, he married a young, pro-choice hijabi who was in her first year of medical school. I don’t know if he is still a Catholic or a communist anymore.
I first met my husband at a library. I remember standing in front of the Glendale Public Library, nervously waiting to be picked up for the retreat. A bright, boxy, 90s-era Ford Astrovan pulled up next to me. There sat my future husband. He wore a pair of round, gold-rimmed spectacles that reminded me of Harry Potter. His hair was shorter then and bleached blonde by the chlorinated pool water in which he spent hours daily.
“Lita?” It was more of a statement than a question. He totally bypassed any semblance of a salutation. He was so unaffected, unimpressed, so unbelievably apathetic and aloof, so aggravatingly haughty, it would have been far more appropriate if he had been driving around in something that better reflected who he was, but the Astrovan was cool.
As an undergraduate at UCR, he never changed his major. He decided on one, and that was that. He did once amend his major so he could add a second major. In the midst of his studies, he asked a respected, renowned modernist scholar and philosopher a question about Locke. This philosopher — who was also quite a gentleman — admitted his ignorance and later put forth the question at a philosophy conference. None of the Locke scholars had an answer to the question. The philosopher suffered a heart attack and died before he could ever give my husband an answer.
My husband is fantastic at asking questions, especially questions without answers. All the questions I ask always have easy answers.
I didn’t have to wait long to receive a response from my mother.
Give me the telephone number I can call you…or if you really do not want to call me, I will just email you as soon as I can for the whole story of emergency (not physical harm emergency but more of emotional emergency) I just got home….bye for now. I love you. ~Mom
I knew it. I knew it all along. An emotional emergency? Right.
When I was 16, I ran away from home, and I didn’t return until my 17th birthday. It was not the first attempt I ever made, but it was the only attempt that I’d deem successful. Each and every time, my mother would frantically call each one of my friends, and I’d be pressured home. This time, something was different.
The day before I planned to leave home, I skipped school. I skipped school to scout out the teen shelter I decided I would stay. I didn’t want to go there, but my mom’s tendency to go batshit crazy calling my friends and the Police left me with few viable, safe options. My mother dropped me off at school that morning, just like she had every day for the past 12 years of my life. I walked in, she drove away, and I kept walking. I kept walking until I found an exit on the opposite end of campus and helped myself out. It was so pathetically exhilarating. As inconspicuously as I could, I walked half a mile to the corner of Central and Lomita Avenue. There, I patiently waited for the 180 to come sweep me away to freedom.
I didn’t have to wait long for the bus to arrive. I got on and paid my fare. It was my first time on a bus, and the air inside tasted stale and warm. To me, it was the taste of liberation, the flavor of self-determination. I loved it.
I got off on the corner of Hollywood and Gower. The chronically creased paper I had printed out with the directions to the teen shelter advised me to walk south for about half a mile. My shoulders were aching beneath the straps of my heavy bag, but I trudged my way towards 1550 North Gower, amazed by the differences I noticed between Hollywood and the area around my parents’ home, which was a mere ten miles away in Glendale. For one thing, there were barely any walk buttons on any of the street corners. Pedestrians in Hollywood liked to teeter dangerously on the edge of the curb as they waited to be signaled to walk, oblivious or maybe apathetic to the cars that swerved dangerously close as they turned the corner.
It wasn’t hard to find the teen shelter. The building was windowless and could have been described as nondescript had it not been for the once vibrant, yet persistently garish mural that blanketed the front. The first thing that came to mind was that it was essentially a whitewashed sepulcher. Except, I thought, instead of being whitewashed, it looks as though a rainbow had its innards spewed and smeared on it. It stood next door to Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. I passed the shelter, walked past Roscoe’s and headed towards the library on Ivar Avenue. I planned on spending the day completing all my assignments I had for school — literally all the assignments I had been assigned through the end of the year — so I wouldn’t have to worry about falling behind. I anticipated the coming days to be particularly tumultuous, and I didn’t want my mother to use my failing grades as the rationale behind why I needed to go back home.
As I arrived at the library, I drank in its aesthetics. Its clean, organic lines and vast, immaculate windows paid rightful obeisance to the southern California modernism from which it was borne. I found an empty table and began to unpack all my books. All my teachers provided students with assignment schedules. I knew every assignment I’d be required to complete through the end of the school year. I was done in a matter of hours, having only taken a short lunch break to buy a hot dog from a pushcart vendor outside. I was extremely responsible and capable. I don’t know why everyone else failed to see it.
There was a specific moment during my glorious, year-long stint away from home that my mother was so frustrated with me that she was foaming at the mouth, literally. Frothy saliva had been accumulating around the corners of her mouth as she vomited her barrage of illogical trash my direction. She had allowed herself to become my father’s waste repository, and she wanted to transform me into the family landfill. I refused to allow her to unload her garbage on me.
“You know this isn’t about you, anymore,” she spat out. “This is about your sister now. Your father and I have given up on you. We’re not even considering you anymore when we make decisions. This is all about Joy.”
“Whatever.” I may have looked calm, but the falsehood of her statements was menacing me towards the outer bounds of composure. “This has never been about me. If you cared about me, you would have protected me from many things, which you failed to do. You’re a failure of a mother, and I’m glad you’re finally deciding to think about Joy. It’s about time. It’s about time someone began to care about her!” I sat back, satisfied that my venomous words had seeped into her heart, evidenced by her silence and the stricken look on her face.
I turned my thoughts to Joy, my little sister. She’s 6 years my junior, and I love her. I thought of her cherubic face, framed by her unassuming, straight black hair. Before I took off, she told me I needed to take her with me.
“You don’t like mom and dad, either?”
“No, I love them,” she replied. “You just need someone to take care of you.”
“I can’t take you, Joy. It’s one thing for me to run away by myself, but mom and dad are going to be very pissed if they find out I took you with me. I could get in a lot of trouble. I can take care of myself.”
“Well, what if you can’t?” Her eyes grew moist, though not a single tear fell. “Promise you’ll be careful.”
I don’t know why I didn’t take her. I thought that if I took her, it would be more like kidnapping. For some reason, I didn’t see it as protecting my younger sister. In retrospect, I wish I had taken her. Her fate, so far, has been far, far worse than mine.
She’s almost 21 now, and she still lives at home. She attends a local community college, but our mother handpicks and registers classes for her. I teasingly assault her with questions on my rare visits.
“What do you want to major in? What do you want to do?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I don’t think about those things. I try not to think about the future.”
As a child, Joy was bright-eyed, lanky and outgoing. She was like an earthquake. Our father avoided taking her out when she was a toddler because when her feet hit the ground, she would take off, sprinting towards a goal no one understood but her. She spent most of her childhood running around, her gangly arms and legs a constant, tangled blur. She’s morbidly obese now, and she squanders her days sitting at her computer. I blame our parents.
Shouting in the next room jars me back into the present. I quickly type out my response: “I don’t want to hear about any emotional emergencies. Thanks for understanding.”
