She Loves the Circus |
23 September 2010
She Loves the Circus
When the older Asian woman hesitantly stepped off the curb on Beverly Boulevard, I was distracted. I had no way of knowing she was about to be killed. But then who does? Rarely does Death send an Evite with a “Save the Date!” notice. What I did notice was the Asian woman had plastic shopping bags from the 99-cent store, and she didn’t use the crosswalk. Then I dismissed her.
It was lunchtime and I was hungry. Hungry and distracted. Earlier that day, I had walked Runyon with a friend and explained I had done one of the hardest things I ever had to do: I had left a complicated relationship with someone I was in love with, knowing that when I did, it wasn’t coming back. But if I was ever going to love myself better, it was by the doing right thing. And I did.
But I was still angry it was over. Angry that what I thought was going to be my future, was already my past. So I ranted to my friend, I was never loved. I was used. I was a distraction. It was much easier for me to dismiss the entire affair as not mutual, to make it black and white, rather than the shades of gray all relationships are.
My friend listened patiently to my anger, and then quietly said, “Maybe that is true. You weren’t loved. But you have no idea what is really in someone else’s heart, so why not think that you were loved? Because even if it’s not true, doesn’t it feel better to think you were?”
I stopped. I knew something profound was happening because yes—my heart had noticeably lifted when she was speaking. It lifted at the thought I was loved, rather than the anger I was feeling that I was not. And I was thinking just that thought—that I will choose to believe that I was loved—when the Asian woman was struck by a car and killed.
I was 2 cars behind the car that hit her. I saw her purse fly onto the street, but it took a while, from all the cars swerving to actually put together what exactly had happened. Yes, the Asian woman with the 99-cent shopping bags was now lying on the ground, in the middle of the street, and she wasn’t moving. A beat, and then everyone made their decisions.
The driver that hit her turned on his emergency flashers, and chose not to move his car, shielding her from further harm. Some cars gingerly went around the driver’s car, making their way to their destinations. Others, like me, pulled over and stopped and got out. Strangers were soon flooding the sidewalks, stepping out of shops, with their cell phones out.
I got out of my car—and realized that most of those with cell phones were not calling 911, but aiming them at the fallen woman, taking pictures. It horrified me—but I also know people react to death in all sorts of unexpected ways. And in our Facebook nation, the woman’s photo was a status update.
I stepped into the street, looking at her, feeling protective. I put my hand on a young man’s cell phone and lowered it. He didn’t balk, getting it. My witness powers now activated, I clocked that he was wearing True Religion jeans.
The Asian woman was face down, her head turned away from me. I would never see her face. But her thinning black hair showed gray roots, and the loose roundness of her shoulders suggested older age. I guessed she was in her early 60s. Old enough to contemplate her mortality, but I am quite sure, not expecting to die today. A line of dialogue washed through me, said by my Southern Grandmother weeks before she died: “Just because you’re old, doesn’t mean you are ever ready to die.”
Then I noticed the legs of the Asian woman were askew, her skirt pushed up, exposing her pale white legs. She wore knee highs. An era gone by that I associated with Aqua Net, Blue Chip Stamps, and pin curls. When my Southern Grandmother died a difficult, lingering death of lung cancer, she wanted to die in her own home. So, I had prepared for the death rattle, the last breath, the light in the room to dim, and her last day to end. So when it came, I was stoic, not a tear. I had prepared.
When she was gone, I calmly called the mortuary as I had been instructed to do. Three people came: two men in black suits pushing a stretcher and a woman with a clipboard. The woman said, "You may not want to watch this part." I said, "I can’t leave her alone.” Then one man took a toe tag, affixed it her bare foot. Read off a number. The other man pushed up her nightgown, took out a black Sharpie and wrote the number on her leg. Then they zipped her up in a black canvas bag and took her away. There is always something in life, in any given situation, that you can’t prepare for. Even when you work in the movies.
It was my Grandmother’s bare calf, with the newly stained numeric tattoo, that I flashed upon when I saw the Asian woman’s exposed legs. One knee high had stayed up, all the way to the knee, but the other knee high had rolled down halfway. It seemed wrong. Indecent. Beyond the indecency of the provocative billboards that litter our city, each pushing the envelope to out lick the last. I remember staring at one of those billboards on Sunset Boulevard, of two models, clenched in a sexual embrace, clothes drenched in wet and desire, thinking, “Well. We know he’s circumcised.”
Only now, those same provocative billboards that I once smirked at, give me a feeling of sadness. Because I have a daughter now, and when you have a child, you are acutely aware how often adults forget children live in our world. They forget when they put up giant billboards of a man’s thinly veiled erection to sell a clothing line, they forget when they decorate buses with movie posters of blood splattered killers with chainsaws, and they forget when they write ad campaigns that promise to end the curse of virginity by calling a toll-free number. They forget that children walk the same streets that adults do, and there is no R rating to hide them from growing up too fast.
But the taking of photographs of a dead woman was a new kind of indecency I hadn’t prepared for. I wanted to rush into the street and roll up the other knee high and roll down her pale blue skirt. But I didn’t. Instead, I turned to the young girl next to me. I didn’t recognize her, but I could tell by her uniform she was a waitress from the sushi restaurant on the corner, where I was headed to eat lunch. She was out of breath, having just run up the street, a bit late to the party. I said, softly, “I doubt that woman knew that her life was going to end today.”
There was a pause, and then I looked at the girl a bit more closely. She was young, and she was also Asian. She had the soft eyes and quiet voice that reminded me of my daughter’s preschool teacher. A sort of preternatural innocence that made me want to shield her from the sight of the dying woman, just like I wanted to shield my daughter's teacher from ever getting her heart broken and shield my daughter from the sight of monsters staring at her from bus stops.
I told the young waitress, “I heard they’ve called 911.” But she was still staring at the body in the street. “Was she Asian? About 60?” Yes. I would guess so. “Did she have shopping bags?” Yes. The girl wrestled with some truth, realizing she couldn’t delay it any longer, and then she said, “She just ate her lunch at the restaurant where I work. I was her waitress. She just lives down the street. She comes here all the time.”
Tears started rolling from her eyes as she replayed the last moments of her own life. “I gave her the bill. I just went to the bathroom—and when I came back to her table, she had paid and was gone.”
The young girl trembled, as if she found the cause. The bathroom. Had she been able to retrace her steps, take that one act back, the woman would still be alive today.
When I waitressed at Bob’s Big Boy, we had the Blue Plate Special. Every week night, between 4 and 6 pm, the seniors in our neighborhood would come out for the Liver & Onions or Fried Chicken dinner at a bargain price. I remember one older longtime married couple, came in every day, requested my section, and always left the same 10% tip, down to the penny of the check. $1.87. $2.14.
As a struggling college student who needed every penny, this kind of perfectionist tipping irritated me, and I found myself rushing their service in lieu of the other regulars who tipped big. So big that I started a secret coalition of the Dessert Plate Specials. I’d survey all the ingredients from the massive dessert bar and create one-of-a-kind presentations that only a budding theatre major could envision. Squares of chocolate cake filled with strawberries, 3 kinds of ice cream, 3 different syrups, whipped cream, fried cinnamon chips, and on slow days, I’d flambé bananas in brown sugar.
The desserts were so elaborate that the 10% Perfectionist Tippers asked the manager what the name of one such dessert was so they could order it themselves, commenting on how beautiful they were. An uncomfortable conversation in his office later, I learned rampant creativity was code for stealing food from Bob. My paycheck was docked and the desserts became dishes of vanilla ice cream once again. A few of my regulars even stopped coming. Then one night, so did the husband of the Ten Percenter couple. The wife sat alone.
I asked her if we should wait for her husband before ordering, assuming he was in the bathroom, when she said he had died over the weekend. I was shocked. When you’re 21, you’re not quite used to people dying on your day off. I asked her why she was there—at Bob’s Big Boy, of all places. She said, “I didn’t know what else to do. He loved it here.” She lowered her voice, and it all came spilling out.
“You know, we’re on Social Security, and every penny counts—yet he always wanted to eat out, even when I said we couldn’t afford it and we should stay home. He thought you were so cute and he used to say, 'She’s going places, that Katherine. She’s going places.' He missed our granddaughters, who live out of state. I think you gave him a chance to be a grandpa again.”
When I was 21, working at Bob’s Big Boy, I didn’t believe I was going anywhere except maybe to night manager, if I played my cards right, and that option was lost when I made supersized desserts. If anything, I voted myself the most likely not to succeed. I was impulsive, sensitive, emotional, and just plain quirky. I didn’t believe it was possible to cross that wide chasm from working the night shift at a diner into Glamorous Hollywoodland, where everyone was so together and talented and it came so easy.
I didn’t know how I would rise above mixing ketchup with hot water to make tomato soup. I may have never believed in myself, but I also never gave up. Somewhere along the way, I realized everything was up to me—what I did, didn’t do, what I believed, didn’t believe. The fingers all pointed to me to create my life, just like I created that newly widowed Ten Percenter one last Katherine Dessert Special that got me fired. Though to be fair to Bob, it was my last day. I had graduated and I was moving to Los Angeles—so really, flambéed bananas in hot fudge with white chocolate shavings was the perfect goodbye.
I have had an incredible year. Not only do I have my health and my rent is paid, the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl, “Valentine’s Day” broke box office records, and my career is soaring. But most importantly, I have friends who truly see me and love me and my daughter has enriched my life in ways I could never have imagined. Just the other day, she said, “Mommy, remember, we always have to help other people when we can.”
I believe none of these extraordinary things in my life would have happened had I not learned early on to donate heavily into the Karma Bank. The moment I stopped blaming others and instead started helping others is when my life turned around.
Yet I can’t rest comfortably in happiness. Somewhere along the way, I also learned it’s unbecoming to shine too brightly. So I start to get uneasy when things are going too well. I have a theory that we have a clock running on the amount of time we will allow ourselves to be happy. As if we’re playing a chess game, facing off against an opponent on a park bench in Washington Square. Something great just happened! We hit the timer. Revel. Joy. Giddy. Buzz. Happiness over. Time to make a move. Time to be unhappy again.
But conversely, we have no timer on unhappiness. We let the motor run forever on the amount of time we will allow ourselves to be unhappy. We can pretty much stay miserable for years, decades even, in unfulfilling jobs, unhealthy relationships, even the cities we live in. We’re much happier being unhappy. We are much more comfortable when something is going wrong, then when something is going right.
When I turn in a draft of a script, the first thing that happens is a notes meeting is set up, before the script is even read. Surely, something’s wrong with it—and we’ll find it and keep finding something wrong with it all the way into production. In fact, something’s still wrong with it when we’re in production and post-production. When a movie is finally done and wrapped, test audiences, then movie critics, will tell us what’s wrong with it before it’s even out in theaters. Then once it’s in theatres, audiences will walk out, telling each other yeah, there were some good parts, but here’s what’s wrong with it...
We love to give notes on scripts and on each other's lives. We're trained to find what's wrong with it. Ever have a friend ask how's it going? We start listing all the good - and then realize, hey that's a lot of good. Let me dig deeper - find a wound and open it. Ouch. Painful. Now I feel worse. Balance has been restored. It's almost self-correcting - dropping the piano on our own heads.
Back on Beverly Boulevard, the police and the ambulance had arrived. The EMTs checked the Asian woman’s vitals, but they didn’t jump on her lifeless body, ER-style, trying to save her life. Instead, they gently lifted her body onto a stretcher and took her away. I wondered if, at some point, someone would roll down the rest of her knee high and Sharpie her leg.
And I thought what my friend said that morning was now even more profound. Yes, it does feel better to choose to believe that you were loved. We should all choose that. Choose what was right, not what was wrong. Choose to reach out and love another human being, as complicated as it may be.
The EMTs were gone. Cars were now driving by as if nothing had happened, not knowing about the life that was lost moments before. I put my arm around the young waitress still standing next to me. She was still shaken, knowing she was perhaps the last person the woman had spoken to before she died.
“I barely knew her,” she said, full of regret.
I told her, “You know, at the end of the day, we all want to be loved. If she came to your restaurant and sat at your table, she saw something in you. As strange as that may sound.”
A moment. As the young waitress looked at me, tears staining her red cheeks, then she inexplicably burst out, “I know! She loves the circus!”
She smiled, happy for a moment at the fleeting memory, then she turned and went back inside.
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