And Now, for the Next Step

"You only call me when you're high," a friend of mine just told me over the phone. And he was right. I've taken to Drinking and Dialing. You've all been on the receiving end of it, if you're on my celly's call list.

Sorry.

I've taken to drinkin', snortin' and dialin'. Sorry. But it's how I line up all the personal calls I want to return. As the weeks progress, and as I work (and work and work), and as the personal calls that need to be returned pile up, I wind up scheduling time on the days when I "partake" to return those calls. See, I want to enjoy them. I want them to not feel like the kind of calls I have to make 5 days a week at work. I want the calls that I make when I call my friends to not feel at all like the calls that I make when I'm calling on prospects for business.

That's why you don't hear from me until late at nite. When I've been drinkin', smokin' and snortin'. I know I must not come across at that time as altogether together. I know I must sound fucked up. Well, that's because I am.

Friends: I'm fucked up. I'm riddled with fear. I've allowed myself to slip back into the bourgeois sensibility I was raised to have. I've let myself go back to the pseudo upper-middle class consciousness that I was bred to live and replicate. In a nutshell (and wouldn't it be great if I could indeed harbor myself in such a place -- in such a safety cone as a nutshell), I've regressed from a consciousness-raising self-employed San Franciscan to a Live-by-the-Clock, "Attend Multiple Meetings and Schedule Yet Even More" New Yorker.

Thing is, I don't think this transition is all that bad.

I don't think it's all that bad, although it is defintiely scary to me. That's why I drink and dial. You see, when I drink and dial, that's when I'm most vulnerable. As much as it must suck to be on the receiving end of those drunken calls, I beg you to understand how lonely a place I'm coming from when I make them.

I'm lonely. I'm alone, with the exception of having a loving dog, and I'm scared. True, I've managed to carve out a domicile in the curious up-and-coming roughneck neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn. I'm doing the best I can, and indeed, some certain forces can be said to have been working in my favor. I can't ignore that. In a lot of ways, things have gone very well for me since I moved here 6 years ago carrying a suitcase and a bunch of unfinished business from L.A.

But now I'm plateau-ing. All the emergencies have faded into just plain middle class responsibilities. I don't know how most folks do it. I don't know how you guys with middle-class lives -- replete with middle-class kids -- do it. I was raised middle class. I always thought I'd escape it. For a while, I did. But lately I haven't been able to.

I'm relatively content in the life that I've worked so hard over the past 6 years to create. Even if it does involve living in a ghetto with a live chicken store in my back yard and crack heads and junkies smoking and shooting up in my hall. It's not at all the middle-class existence I was raised to have. But I've managed to make it as middle-class as possible.

There's no mistaking it. I'm a Bohemian. No matter how much or how little money I bring in per year, I'm still a Bohemian. My goal, socio-economically speaking, is to earn middle-class earnings whilst retaining a Bohemian lifestyle. So far I'm doing that. And that's why I'm so depressed.

I'm getting what I wanted, and realizing I need to want a heck of a lot more in order to get more of what I need. I need to raise the stakes, even though my middle-class job leaves me exhausted each week. I hate -- I simply hate -- that the answer for us working-class folks always seems to be, "Work harder."

Well, I'm going to work harder. I'm woring hard right now, and it sucks, and it's depressing me, but I'm going to work harder nonetheless. Until or unless somebody presents me with something more worthwhile, that's all I can do. So if you're worried that I'm too busy right now, working, you can be assured it's only going to get worse.

And so, the drinking and dialing might continue. I'll stop it at your request, but in the meantime, it'll go on. It's all I've got to connect with you. If you want to arrange some other way to connect, by all means, let me know and we'll arrange it. All I want is to connect.

I'm staring down the barrel of 45. My stage and writing career snuffed themselves out when I hit my mid-30s and settled down in Los Angeles with a man who would prove himself to be emotionally abusive. Yes, of course, I let him be so. I know. I know. But knowing so doesn't bring back all that lost time...

All this moving about. All this relocating. It has to stop. I have to put down some roots. And so I have. In an up-and-coming neighborhood in Brooklyn called Bushwick. But it's come with a price tag. A hefty price tag. 6 years, from age 39 to 45, have been sacrificed in order for me to merely start pushing out some roots.

I don't know how many of you have had to "go it alone" the way I have. It's not easy. I do my best to refrain from becoming a burden on my friends and family. I grew up young. At 19 I was working 3 part-time jobs and going to college full time. Despite the slacker days in San Francisco (during which I still maintained my own lifestyle), and despite a few slacking months here in Brooklyn, I've always worked. I've always, with a few exceptions, been my own man. And the time whe I wasn't were miserable for me. Absolutely miserable.

All I'm asking for is some understanding. It I call you late at night, drunk or buzzed or high, well -- can ya just cut me some slack? You don't have to pick up. And you can tell me how fucked up I sounded on your voice mail. That's all part of the deal.

But the deal is, I gotta hear your voice. Even if it's your voice mail.