Californicating

Posted on January 23, 2009

Fate is like a smart-mouthed waitress, hovering over, glaring down. I imagine her saying, Kiss my grits. “You think someone is gonna solve your problems? Sugar, let me tell you something. God helps those who help themself.” Yup. That’s how it runs sometimes. Pray all you like, but don’t expect an intervention. And should your full-of-faith friends invoke the above rationale as reason not to stick out their necks, that really narrows your options. You can either pray for the existence of a benevolent deity or solve the whole damn thing yourself. Are you fucked? Not completely. But you’re treading water wearing handcuffs.I remember my last day safely tucked in a corporate cubicle: September 2000. I was an account exec at a Santa Monica ad firm. The office was lousy, the job sucked, though they’d enticed me with verbal photographs of afternoons playing beach volleyball. Never take a job based on extracurriculars, but then again, I was twenty-five and living in Los Angeles. This can be hazardous to your health in any number of ways.As a firm, we lived in eternal hot water. We marveled at our clients’ apparent stupidity on an almost daily basis. Why did they keep us? We wouldn’t. We would have fired us long ago. We serviced high-technology companies. Not the cool ones—we were the last place that those outfits turned. Our clients made things like semiconductors, and required awesomely dull campaigns targeting very specific nerds. We persisted on ever-dwindling profits, even when Nasdaq was running strong. And when the dot.com’s suddenly flatlined, our group—hardly an industry leader in any brand of sunny adjective, was one of the first to commence shedding weight.One afternoon, my manager called me into the small conference room, gave me a miniature bottle of water, and told me they were laying me off. “Downsizing,” he shrugged. I sat doe eyed, staring at the table grain. I’d never been fired from anything before. A flood of questions ran through my mind. How much notice would I get? Would there be a severance package? I wondered why my boss wasn’t delivering the news. Bart was outside at his desk. His desk was twenty feet from my desk. It wasn’t like this was General Electric. I could see the idiot shuffling papers, wearing his usual shit-eating grin.My overlord roughly cleared his throat. “Bart wants a financial settlement. He thinks that would be best for all. Unfortunately, you’re the first, and Bart doesn’t want others getting nervous. He wants to offer you $500 if you’ll tell everyone that you quit.”“You mean lie,” I said, reframing the obvious.“Well…” he started, but he didn’t bother finishing. The extended tongue chomp on his ll’s, those dancer’s legs of the Greek alphabet, made whatever words would have followed manifestly obvious. He blushed when he said it, but really this was a sad looking dude. He was in his middle fifties, graying hair, a hangdog face. His were the eyes of a buck private following bad orders.“Take the money,” he told me gently. “You’ll need it until you can get a new job.”I never got a new job.As I grow older, I keep believing that life will get better. That the treacheries of grade school and perfidies that filled my twenties, will at some point give way to a gentler existence without so many sharpened edges. But until that happens, if it does, I’ve come to accept that attaining some fleeting measure of happiness depends on my ability to laugh in the blathering face of misfortune. Shit happens, it happens to all of us, and often its most enduring lessons come from irreversible acts. But if we can write shit down, or paint shit, or blow it through a trumpet, or transform it through any other number of means, we can capture beauty from anything ugly. That to me is the power of art.I’ve reminded myself of this over the years. Through bad gigs and no gigs, illnesses, money woes, a seemingly endless screed of afflictions raining down over me. I reminded myself after flipping Bart the bird on my way out the door. I reminded myself for years as a stringer, overworked and underpaid. I reminded myself when readers bought magazines with only pictures in them. (Look at her! Holding coffee! Look at him! No shirt!) And I reminded myself when strong magazines folded, writers got poorer, and paparazzi got rich.I reminded myself when, gig prospects dwindling, I scratched for some way back into the cubicle. I clawed at it, gnawed at its edges, but companies weren’t eager to hire journalism backgrounds. Soon, all I could do was remind myself as a way to bolster my flagging spirits.I opened a bible, read Job, but it didn’t cheer me up.I faced a bankruptcy of options. My family had no contacts, my friends had no leads. I’d been diagnosed with a rare illness my HMO refused to treat. Everyone I knew, it seemed, sat watching my life burst into flames like a Chevrolet toppling down a ravine.“God helps those who help themselves.”It had to be fate talking because it didn’t sound like the man upstairs. It sure didn’t sound like no Sermon on the Mount.I reminded myself the next morning, as I stared at Maurice’s numbers, which I’d jotted onto the back of a bill. Three thousand days since I last left the cubicle. Eight years of treading water. The cubicle felt so far away, it seemed little more than a cosmic speck. I’d arrived at a choice, one that didn’t seem real, yet I saw no other discernible options. In life, no matter who you are, whether you’re a saint or sinner, you’ll occasionally come to moments when you’ll make astonishing decisions. I’d like to say these will be the culmination of a hard-fought epiphany; that they’ll arrive like breezes rolling over Masada.But the truth is, fate will fall over your lap in the same drunk way that shit goes down on an hourly basis. You’ll size up your options and make a choice. You’ll do so because you’ve grown tired of waiting for a happy coincidence. Because god’s not answering and everyone trips down their own hard path. You’ll choose and quietly hope for the best. Bells won’t ring. Angels won’t sing. The Starbucks barista won’t give you a pastry. You’ll do it because you have to do something. And maybe, if your heart is good, you’ll try to make something beautiful from it.You’ll tell yourself, “I gave lightning a chance to strike. Now it’s time to strike at lightning.”This is how I went into the marijuana business.First Person is Walkabout Jones’ firsthand look into timely subjects. Currently: Medical Marijuana

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