My move

I’ve been away for a couple weeks.  I know that’s the wrong thing for a blog to do; we’re supposed to put up something once a week, and I tried to stay true to that, but recently I have been moving to a new apartment.  This is my first move in nearly 20 years.

I moved into apartment M in September, 1995.  I had come to LA trying to make it in the film industry.  Originally, I had planned to work in New York, or maybe some other town that was starting to build an independent film scene, like Austin or Wilmington.  But I had a few promises of work here, so I maxed out my credit cards and went into deep debt so I could get out here and work my way up the ladder.

I had a choice between this one and another on the opposite side of town.  The other apartment building had a pool and was across the street from a park.  This one had no pool, but the building looked nicer, and a beautiful woman who was an occasional actress on Bay Watch lived next door, and was the manager.  Of course, I picked the latter.  To my credit, it was also down the street from Warner Brothers and Universal Studios, and Disney was just a few blocks down another street.  I was also at the intersection of two of the main streets in town.  So I stayed.  I always wondered how different my life would have been if I had chosen the other apartment; the people I would have met, the connections that would have changed had I been a little earlier or a little later arriving somewhere, or coming home.  Would it have made a difference on my life?

My apartment was a studio; one main room with a bathroom and a kitchen.  There were quirks about it, such as points on the floor that would creek when I stepped on them.  But that didn’t matter.  I’d only be in there for a little while.  Once I made my money back and had the large income I was expecting, I’d be in a much nicer apartment, and probably in a house.

But the promised jobs didn’t come, and I wound up wandering from temp job to temp job always barely getting by.  I kept living very temporary, never making my place into a real home, but always ready to move when I got that big break.  Year after year I was on the brink of something big; a job I was great for, a script I had written, a directing job I was being considered for, a movie that was on the brink of getting its financing.

But nothing worked, and I just kept living year after year in a temporary place.

I had a girlfriend who went off to Santa Barbara for college.  I spent every weekend there, and when she was off for breaks, she stayed at my place.  She wound up there for the first summer, then the second, and finally when she graduated she moved in temporarily until she could find her own place.  She got comfortable, and just stayed.  Looking back, it was a rather odd situation as not only did we have two people crammed into a studio apartment, but both of us were living temporarily.  My things were put away, but despite having lived there for five years, I had never really arranged things in a specific order.  Why do that when you’re going to move out?  I just kept putting things where they fit in preparation for moving out.  My girlfriend just fit her stuff wherever there was room.  We both planned on getting a one or two bedroom together once she was making money.

But she had been even more unrealistic than I had been.  She had majored in piano performance, but was afraid to play for anyone, so she just jumped from one temp job to the next.  She was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder, so she had to pay for a lot of medications, and both the disease and the side effects got in the way of getting work.  There was also the fact that she couldn’t drive a car.

She wound up blaming me for her life not going anywhere, and broke up with me, but she didn’t leave.  Instead, she just slept on the floor and I had to kick her out.  Since I was back in the dating world, I organized the apartment to look nice, but the place was still more or less not organized as a regular home.  After several bad dates led me to missing the women with whom I had lived, I finally decided it was time to wipe her visually out of my life.  I completely re-organized the apartment.  I repainted the walls, redid the furniture, replaced most of the pictures hanging on the walls, took everything out of their closets, and repacked them into place.  It was the first time I actually decorated the apartment to be a home more than a hotel room.  I arranged all the parts of my life into specific areas, categorized by their purposes.  My various film projects had their places, the information I had on various connections were in their proper spots, my games were tucked away in one closet while my books were aligned on the shelves organized by genre rather than tossed wherever was convenient.  I managed to make more out of the room in that tiny apartment than most people make out of a whole house.  The walls were decorated with my photography and other things regarding my life for which I was proud.  There was only one spot I did not fill, the area at the front, above the TV; to spot most visible, the place you saw when you first entered.  This needed to be the centerpiece of my home.

I decided to let that decision be made while out on a date with another woman of whom I was very fond.  She and I were supposed to go to Venice Beach and I decided that while we were there, I would choose something with her, and that would become the centerpiece of that wall.  Before we did, this woman suddenly told me she had no interest in being with me anymore.  I was blown apart, especially as she had been telling me not a week earlier that we were extremely close kindred spirits.

I felt more alone than I ever had before or ever had since.  El Nino was going on at that time, so it was raining all the time.  My job had to temporarily lay me off as they didn’t have enough work, and two films I had been developing which were supposed to be funded were both knocked down.  I had a nervous breakdown, and never left my apartment for close to three weeks.  I tore down many of the things I had put up, trashing the home I had created.  I got out of bed only to lie in the bathtub where I laid in it so long the water dissolved out.  Sometimes I didn’t make it back to my bed, I just lay on the ground naked and cried.

For a long time I didn’t re-organize my apartment.  Everything felt hopeless.  But after several more weeks I began putting things back together.  As I did, I found a couple games I had borrowed from a friend years before.  I had borrowed them for the girlfriend who lived with me.  She had put it with her stuff she left behind when she moved out, and I was embarrassed that I still had it.  I took it to a friend, who told me the place he worked was hiring, and I got a great job making training videos.  Life slowly came back together, and I put together a feature film.  The group who made the film came together much like a family, and it was one of the most pivotal times of my life.  We used the apartment as four different places, redecorating it for each location.  Though it was one room, it was made to look like several, and helped the film look like it had a much higher budget than it really did.  When the movie was done, I had a poster printed out and put that at the head, just above the television, which itself was given to me by the lead actress.  It was a reminder of how my life was put back together.

I was later laid off by the job, and I used the severance money to build a photography studio in the apartment.  I kept half of it for my sleeping quarters, and used the other half as an area to hang backdrops, place up set pieces, position props, models, etc.  I sometimes turned it around and used the sleeping area as a backdrop when it was appropriate.  Large sections of the shelves were used for photography, and a section was opened up to something else I was doing more recently, writing.  Research went in one area, completed pages went into another, and books I was reading took up a shelf that had previously been used for DVDs.  I was still trying to succeed in the film industry, but it had let me down so many times, I was starting to turn to other areas.

One such area was games.  I had also invented a few games, and I had a couple of the larger cabinets filled with boxes of pieces that I occasionally used to create those.  I had another large closet filled with my ever-growing collection of board games.

Most of the time I didn’t notice how the place looked.  I’m so lost in my head when I write that I lose track of the world around me.  But I began to notice a bit more when Jamie came into my life.  She lived miles away, far into the valley, but when she came over, she noticed the way the place looked, so I tried to keep it orderly for her.  She then got a job right next to Warner Brothers, so she “temporarily” moved in with me until she could find another place nearby.  We just enjoyed living together, and found it to be a waste to spend more money on another apartment, so a couple week’s stay turned into a couple years.

Jamie was used to living in small spaces.  Ever since she moved to LA, she had rented rooms from people rather than having an apartment of her own.  So she didn’t have a problem squeezing her things into areas where I didn’t already have my stuff, and keeping them out of the way of the photography “studio.”  She organized the place so it both looked better and operated more efficiently.  She got a new bed to put in the place, and some new decorations to make it feel like our place.  But it really wasn’t.  No matter what we did, it had been my place that she squeezed into.  She was still more like a long-term guest than a person who lived there.  It was probably partially because of this that she kept looking for other places to live, especially when she got other jobs further in LA.

But none of the places were quite right for her, either because of financial or other considerations.  But when a one bedroom opened up down the hall in our same building, we knew we had to take it.  It’s been a struggle getting the money together for the initial move, but we’re making it happen.  There’s far more room and we can live much more like normal people.  We can even have people come and stay on our couch without it being strange that they’re sleeping right next to us.  We can have parties and host them in the living room without them seeing our entire lives or sitting on our bed; it’s amazing!

Since she had moved into my place before, as we planned this new place, she was in charge of organization.  She plotted out each room and moved her things in first so it was our place rather than mine with her as a guest.  She arranged a corner of the living room to be my office where I have DVDs and movie supplies on one side of me, and books and research on the other to support my growing writing career.  And best of all, I can write late at night without keeping her up.

When I went to the utilities department to change our address, they told me someone would be by this week to turn off the power.  I couldn’t help but think that it was this act that began my living there.  Someone in 1995 came and turned the power off.  And now, this week, someone will be coming by to turn it off.

I won’t lie; this new place is far better than the old place.  There’s even more light that comes in.  But I have to admit, I feel very sentimental to the place.  This transitional home turned into my safe haven for nearly two decades, and now it’s been left behind.  Whenever I think of it, I’ll always remember the saying from a poster I hung up at the head of the bed during my photography phase.  It said, “Not all who wander are lost.”  Living in such a small, low cost place gave me the ability to wander in life and seek out my interests.  I have finally found it in writing books and designing games.  I felt lost many times, but as long as I had apartment M to call home, I was only wandering.