Remembering Linda

Monthly Archives: April 2014

Remembering Linda

Sat down to check my schedule for the week. 14th, nothing. 15th, taxes…done and filed months ago. 16th. My eyes froze on the date… all it said was “Linda 2008”. How could it be six years already? How could someone I loved so dearly be gone six whole years? Yet, she is and as I write this my heart feels a little heavier, a little sadder, a little less full. But it’s a little happier because I carry her memory with me where ever I go.
She wasn’t a girlfriend. She was older than I. She wasn’t a relative but I’ve since learned that blood does not make a relative. She wasn’t someone I would usually be friends with. Yet, when we first met, on that first night, over 60 years ago, I can remember laughing and loving her instantly. She was like a pair of old slippers that had curled to the bumps in your feet. She was that old pair of pj’s with the hole in the crotch that is the only pair that let’s you sleep soundly. She was kittens and puppies and good drugs… she was My Linda.
I feel guilty calling her “My Linda” she had a real brother, she had friends who would cut off limbs for her. But to me, she was mine alone. She was the one I ran to the night I found out my child was not mine. She was the one who held me as I cried for hours. I was the one who she went to when her life was falling apart. We were the cog and wheel in each other’s lives. And when she lived out here, there was not a day that went by when we did not pick up the phone and just touch base. You see, when Linda was in my world it was a better place, a warmer place, a safer place. When Linda was around there was always smile to be had, a laugh to laughed, a joke to be told. I guess I am describing a soul mate.
She had not had an easy life. It was one illness after another. It was one bad relationship after another. It was torture and pain and saddness and near the end a little joy. Her son. How she loved her son. How she wanted her son… when we spoke it was all she talked about. I was his Uncle. I celebrated the birth of the extension of her. And on the morning I got the email, two words… “Linda Passed” it was her son that I was thinking about and how would he survive.
This next bit I don’t know how to even begin to tell you. So I guess I’ll just tell you exactly like it happened. About two weeks after Linda passed I got an email. “I saw your message in the memory book about Linda. I would like to talk to you about her.” And there was a phone number. I called it. A woman answered. “Um… you don’t know me… but… my name is… and I was wondering… how… um…” And without even knowing where it came from and without her saying another word I said, “Oh My God… you’re her daughter.” And the woman said, “Yes”. My head began to spin. She was a twin. And…there was an older daughter as well. Three children. I spoke to the woman for half an hour… I asked her to send me photos… proof… something I could believe in. We hung up and I immediately called Marlene, Linda’s close enough to be sister. “Sit down.” Is all I said. I then told her what had been told to me… “Holy shit.”, is all Marlene said. There was a moment of complete silence. And then she and I began to laugh. We laughed long and hard over the little surprise that Linda had planned for us.
Must have been three days later when the photos arrived. I looked at it and there was no doubt in my mind. None at all. She was a clone of Linda. It was like having Linda back again. It was a piece of my friend that I had lost that was now close enough to hold. I immediately called her. “WELCOME TO THE FAMILY!!!!” is all I said. She wanted to know everything she could about Linda and I told her. I tried to take the memories in my mind and somehow telapahtically send them to her so she could remember her mother the way I did.
Funny how life is. About four months later I was driving down the San Diego Freeway and out of nowhere a bolt of memory hit me. I was sitting next to Linda’s hospital bed, it was one of her many trips to the emergency room. She turned to me and said, “I’m such a bad person. I gave up my children.” And I said, “What are you talking about.” And it was then she told me about the twins. My love for her was so complete… so unconditional that I said, “You did what you had to do… and I’m sure it was the right thing.” And then, I put it out of my mind, never to think of it again until that moment on the San Diego Freeway when Linda came to me and refreshed my memory.
And so I celebrate another anniversary of Linda’s passing. Although celebrate is the wrong word. You don’t celebrate the moment that your loved one is taken from you. But I can’t say I grieve my Linda’s anniversary either. Why? Cause she left me a little gift with purchase. She left me her daughter and when I need a little Linda I send a little email and I get a little Linda love back.
My only wish for Linda is that she is resting in peace…if anyone deserved to have a quiet eternity, it’s that girl I met a the “Y” who changed my life, who taught me what love is, who made me laugh and at this moment….is making me cry.
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JURY DUTY

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It’s every American’s duty to serve on a jury. It is our civic pride which gives us the honor to sit in judgment of another citizen. And I am here to tell you… do everything in your power to get out of it… it’s a fucking nightmare.
Here’s how it starts. You’re having a wonderful day, the sun is shining, the flowers are in bloom, a cool breeze is blowing through your garden and the postman drives up to your house. He’s got an evil grin on his face… it’s “Ha HA!!!!! This is for not tipping me last Christmas.” And he shoves the summons into your mailbox. You open it, suddenly there are clouds in the sky, your flowers are being eaten by a herd of snails and a tornado just took out your house garden…. YOU HAVE JURY DUTY.
This is how it begins. You fill out of the form and if you opt to go through early orientation via the Internet you don’t have to arrive at 7 a.m. So I sit through seven of the most mundane, boring, idiotic videos I have ever seen. “Dress code for court is business casual… no flip flops, not tank tops, please wear shoes.” Who the fuck goes to court barefoot? So after you watch the 7 videos you have to take a test. I flunked it. I had to watch the videos again… take the test again…it was the SAT’s all over again. I finally pass and am told when to call to see if I was needed on a particular day. Are you ready for this? They expect you to clear out your calendar for one week, to give you the honor of driving downtown in rush hour traffic, to sit in a room to then be told you would be picked to be on a jury. This is a dream come true… couldn’t they just attach electrodes to my testicles.
Monday at 5 p.m. I drop to my knees and ask God to get me out of Jury Duty. I call. I am not needed. Tuesday, same routine. Not needed. Wednesday… come on God, you’ve been doing great so far…. I call. THERE IS NO GOD… I need to show up Thursday at 9:30 or as I see it… at the height of rush hour.
This is what you have to know about me. When I have something to do I cannot sleep. I went to bed at 10 p.m. I slept the entire night, opened my eyes refreshed and ready to go.. I look at the clock. It’s 3:30 a.m. I lie in bed with my eyes wide open until 6:30 a.m. when I jump out and take a shower. I leave the house at 8 a.m. bumper to bumper from my front door to the first major intersection. I reprogram my GPS for the shortest route to the courthouse. It takes me through villages in Guatemala.
I finally arrive downtown where I’m instructed to park at the Disney Concert Hall. I enter the building and am sent so low in the basement Satan got the last space. I then have to walk to the courthouse. Now if this were New York City I wouldn’t think anything of it… it’s only six blocks. But this is LA. The last time I walked six blocks in LA Eisenhower was in office.
I get to the court building where I am frisked and sent through a metal detector. I head for the bank of elevators. Ten elevators… 500 people. Ding. The light goes off at elevator one. 500 people stampede to that elevator… ten get in. Ding. The light goes on at elevator six. The stampede rushes to that elevator. And that’s how it went for ½ an hour until I won the elevator lotto and an elevator arrived at a door I was standing in front of.
I arrive at my floor and check in with the court clerk. I walk into the room of 400 chairs or as I call it purgatory. You could hear a pin drop. 400 people not a sound, it was something I had never seen before… group shock. I find a seat and it’s then I start looking over the crowd. OMG… it’s a Cinco D’ Mayo festival. All around me people are speaking Spanish. And those who weren’t speaking Spanish were speaking Mandarin. America really is a melting pot. There were a few valley people there… and an assortment of freaks. A guy with a pentagram on his hat… a 400 pound guy carrying a lunch pail… the Unabomber.
And so this melting pot of humanity sits there 9 a.m. 10 a.m. 11 a.m. Noon… the quiet room has now got this low murmur going. AND THEN… “We are ready to pick our first panel.” And the names are being announced over the loud speaker: “Mario Gonzalez… Victor Consualo, Arturo Hernadez… Maria Ortez…” With every name there is a sense of relief that your name has not been called. I turned to the woman sitting next to me and said, “Now I know how Anne Frank felt.” HUGE LAUGH.
We break for lunch. However, same game at the elevators. I give up and go back to purgatory where I begin posting on Facebook… all I need is a little inspiration and I’m off and running. The posts are funny and furious. Now I’m posting photos. Now I’m Facebooking with Marsha Posner Williams. We are laughing so hard that others are looking at me like I’ve lost my mind…which I am about to.
We come back after lunch… it’s 1:30. We hear the announcement that sends shivers down our spines. “We are ready to pick our next panel.” I am not picked. 2:30 3:00 3:30.. I know we are let go at 4 pm. If I can just make it till 4 I am free for a year. At 3:45 a woman approaches the podium. “May I have your attention?” 200 people’s hearts stop. “The courts have called down and we don’t need any more panels for today.” An audible “YES” is heard through the room. They call out our names…we give back our juror badge… and we head for the elevators to wait for the elevator lotto game again. Not a word is being spoken but as we pass through the front door heading for the street a woman says to no one… “What a monumental waste of time.” To which a second woman says, “And this is the four time they’ve done this to me.” To which another woman says, “And they don’t care.” I am silent. I am the observer and reporter of human emotions. I am watching and listening. But I will tell you this. There has to be a better system than the one I just experienced. With all the technology of today, there has to be a better way to find a jury than to hold hundreds of people captive for a week…force them to do something they don’t want to do… take them out of their lives and their jobs to pass judgment on another human being. And if I were a felon and saw who the jury pool was… I would plea bargain immediately because I would NOT want any of THOSE people deciding my fate. I now see how George Zimmer walked. I now see how our prisons are filled with innocent people. This is no way to run a court system. And I wish I had a better answer… but I don’t. Sad. No?

There are good days and bad…

wild-for-color-11.jpgGOOD DAYS AND BAD

It started at 8 a.m. The phone rang, it was Roz Kind. “Your joke got a huge laugh.” And then she goes on to tell me how the joke that I gave her for her act worked and how wonderful her gig in New York City is going and that she got rave reviews and that everyone has been so wonderful to her. And my response was, “it’s about time.” So that started the day off beautifully… was so happy for her. (And for me, love it when a joke I write gets a huge laugh.)

Later in the day I went to the mailbox and there were the contracts for my play. No fuss, no fighting, no long drawn out “the attorneys need to look a this”; just “I’ll send you the contracts and the check” …and it arrives. And while I’m making out the deposit slip… rule one in show business deposit the check immediately… while I’m filling out the deposit slip The Jon Lovitz Club calls me. “Steve would you…” and inside my fear and anxiety meter go through the roof. Me? You want me? You want me to do what, host? HOST? Be charming and introduce someone else? I don’t know how to do that. I’m too shy. I’m not charming enough. I’m charming challenged. But they were so nice and they seemed to think that I could do it…. So I said yes. Why? For the first time in my life a little voice in my head said, “What have you got to lose?” And I said, “Yes” I agreed to do something that has me petrified for decades, stand on stage as myself and let the world in. Because we all know that if they world sees the real me, they will not like me… old tapes…these tapes are so old they are 8 track. So I said yes!

What the hell is going on with me? Could this be change? Could this be a little self- confidence coming to the surface? I don’t know… all I know is that I, who never wanted to do stand up again, is now doing stand up on May 20th and May 22nd. 20th at the Jon Lovitz Comedy Club at Universal City and the 22nd at the Catalina Club for the birthday fund raiser for David Zimmerman. Wait… they’re not raising funds for David Zimmerman, he’s raising funds for a very worthy cause. And when I get there that night I will find out what that cause is.

Ok, so Roz called, the check arrived and I’m doing stand up again. I went to the gym and worked out. One of the trainers came up to me… “I went to your website. It’s gorgeous. The colors, the videos…it was like I was getting to meet you all over again.” And then she went on to say, “I remember you. I saw you in Vegas… I hung out at the Comedy Store. I wondered what happened to you.” And I said, “I was on the treadmill” She laughed and I said a little “thank you God” for putting Marilyn Johnson in my life. She single handedly directed the creation of the website. She and Bryant are bringing me into the computer age kicking and screaming. And I’m so glad they are because when that trainer said that to me, I felt a part of something I have not felt a part of in a long time.

Then John Fungelsang asked to be my friend on Facebook. I didn’t ask to be HIS friend…HE asked to be MY friend. Ya know, it’s days like this that make we wonder if tomorrow I’ll have that massive heart attack that will leave me pale and pasty and unable to walk the steps of my house. So far, so good… not even chest pains.

Yep, there are good days and bad days… today was one of the good ones. Kinda makes me feel that light at the end of the tunnel is NOT a train.

The First Blog:What am I doing? I'm dyslexic.

Ok,so the web master called and gave me the instructions… ya push this button here, ya click that, ya go over there, then you log the meta information and ya press send. And steam came out of each ear like I was Roger Rabbit. My eyes rolled back in my head and my tongue hit the desk. You see, I’m dyslexic. The information goes in and then that voice that you hear inside your head… it starts screaming… WHAT ARE YOU DOING…. YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND…. YOU’RE A MORON…. YOU’LL NEVER GET THIS RIGHT… and the whole thing shuts down like a computer with a virus.

Being dyslexic is the worst thing that ever happened to me… um… it’s one of the worst things that has ever happened to me. My parents divorce was the worst thing, that was followed by finding out my child was not mine and THEN comes the dyslexia. And being dyslexic what would the worst possible job one could get? If you are dyslexic and they put a gun to your head and tell you… you have to do this job… what do you think it would be? Naturally, it would be working in the buying office of a major metropolitan department store. A job where you have to deal with entering numbers all day long. A job where one mistake makes a 6000 dollar order a 60,000 dollar order. Ya, that’s the job I got right after college. Why? Executioner was taken. I remember sitting at my desk, tears rolling down my eyes because I was so miserable, because I felt I HAD to be in that job, because I was told that “YOU ARE NOT AN ARTIST… YOU HAVE TO HAVE JOB.” And so for two years I sat entering numbers hoping that there would be a fire in the building and my mistakes would be consumed by flames.

I want you to know I did this twice… once at Alexanders in New York City and once in Los Angeles at the May Company. Why, you ask yourself? I’m a glutton for punishment. Eventually it catches up with you and you get fired. That’s what happened to me at The May Company. I got fired. The head of HR called me up to her office and validated every rotten feeling I ever had about myself. She told me all the things that I feared… that I was stupid..that I was unable to comprehend the complexities of the systems, that anyone, a piece of furniture, would be better in the job than me. In reality she said that the buyer needed someone more of top of the figures… but on the translations computer in head she was telling me everything I ever feared about myself.

I walked out of that office almost in a coma. I remember walking directly from the HR office to store nurse. That’s how much pain I was in. And as I sat there I was asking for a sign that this was a good thing, that getting fired from a job I detested was going to turn out well, that… well, you get the picture. And I looked down at my hand and I saw the sign.The thumb on my right hand had turned a bright red, a rash covered the entire thumb and no other part of my hand. Now usually this would send me to the emergency room. But today it was the sign I needed. You see, when my grandmother was dying in the hospital she would reach out through the bars of her bed and she would take my hand and wrap her fingers around my thumb… my right thumb. And we would sit there as she gasped for breath and was trying to pass over.

I looked at my thumb and knew that my grandmother was with me. She loved to watch WHO CAN YOU TRUST with a young Johnny Carson. She once turned to me and said, “You could do that.” She only said it once. And it was the only positive thing she EVER said to me. After all, I was my father’s son and since he was the moron who ruined her favorite daughter’s life then I must be a piece of shit too… you know, guilt by association. I took whatever positive feedback I could from that woman. And that day I got “You could do that.” The rash was absolute proof to me that I was headed in the right direction.

I went back up to my office and sat and talked with my assistant. I told him I was going to be a comedian. That I had to try to be a comedian because it’s what I always wanted to be. And I remember exactly what I said to him, “If I don’t try now, all of my life I will say what if I had tried… at least if I try and fail I would have made the effort. I have to know if I can do it.” And so I packed up my things and left The May Company to begin my journey in show business. I had it all, the youth, the talent, the good looks… what I didn’t have was the belief that I had the youth, the talent, the good looks. And that would be the Achilles heel of my stand up career.

But writing, for some reason, has been my savior. I am able to put down on paper my emotions and have the reader actually feel them. It has been the most rewarding experience of my life. One door closed, stand up… another opened… writer/playwright. The dyslexic became a writer…with his own website, with his own blog. And here I will stay hoping that what I write will amuse and inform and make the reader feel. I’ll proofread it but you’ll have to know that there will be mistakeIMG_0192_1.jpgs. Myself will be myself… from will be form… and I will never see those mistakes. I am asking for you permission to NOT be 100% to be 85% or 90% and to make it be all right, that you will still come back and read more of my writings.

So this is my first entry in my very own blog. I hope you come along with me on my journey as I vent, I scream, I pour my heart out to nobody in particular. It’s my dyslexic blog and I thank you for reading the first entry.