Some can say I’m absent-minded and don’t pay attention to detail. Sure, but sometimes it works out in my favor like in February when I saved more than I’d ever done in a single quarter. It was a clerical error and I might as well enjoy myself since it was someone else’s error.
A world of responsible things to be done and the only thing that came to mind was to fly my best friend out to Hollywood for Grammy’s weekend so we could go see Andy Garcia at the Catalina Jazz Club.
People can talk, but it was soon learned that only one name could trigger the Wellness Brigade to come south and that name is from North Carolina. They arrived, I was given snacks, a pep talk, blah blah blah. The one thing they wanted to ensure was that my windfall wasn’t from anything that could hurt them.
I was lectured on house raids, brothels, and dead bodies in hotel rooms. If you want to lay awake at night, ask a PTA mom what she thinks it could be about. She will take it so far left field that you start to wonder if you are actually guilty of everything she mentioned and somehow forgot.
Everyone that entered my space I casually asked, “Hey, how’s it going? By the way, have I offended you in some way, and by chance do you want to kill me?” The answer was always, not at all, are you okay?
I take zero accountability, especially if the outcome was Andy Garcia serenading my cheesecake. The problem with having a Ginger from Casino problem is that you can’t take advice from people who don’t look like Ginger. So I had to travel North to ask one in person.
She listened to my story and explained that it was a clerical error and she got zero vibes that it was anything else. She then asked when the next Beverly Hills weekend was. It turns out it was a one-time thing.
I think a misunderstanding exists about me that only the wellness brigade and my close relatives understand. I’m a fuck-up. It was masked well by great parents who could find the positive in anything. They would bail me out of one thing or another and I would plan a fun family event for them to wipe out the memories of whatever I’d just done.
All over social media there are beautiful family photos from over twenty years ago reposted by people I never met. A happy family with shots of different generations. Filled with love and all the stuff that makes normal people happy. Those photos were born out of one of my fuck-ups. I decided I wanted to be a photographer, bought a bunch of equipment I couldn’t afford, and signed up for classes where I could develop 35mm black and white photos because I wanted them to be authentic. I loved it, but I also decided I wanted to go to film school instead.
When I told my mom, I was waiting for the fuck-up lecture, but I had somewhere to be. I needed something quick, I knew she had a trip planned and I told her that she should hire a photographer and take beautiful memories like when she was a kid since everyone was older with kids. Her interest was peaked and my budding photography career was forgotten. Those photos exist because my mom loved family, but the idea was born from someone apologizing for overspending on a Canon and a bunch of equipment. I milked it for years. Anytime someone asked me about my life I took a photo. It was always framed perfectly capturing a beautiful moment and the questions were forgotten.
That was our dance for over three decades. I go off and do something that I think is super cool and when it didn’t pan out, they cleaned it up and I came up with a fun event that would replace the happiness I didn’t provide by actually accomplishing something. It was a great time, but the rate of exchange deeply diminished with their passing.
I took off on a two-week trip to New York to party with my friends for my birthday masked with a job offer that was on the table. Unbeknownst to me one of the people I drank with that night would be my future boss. I spent over half a decade working a job I never knew I would get because it made my mom happy when all I wanted to do was stand at the top of the Empire State Building 29 and come down when I was 30. A single elevator ride up 101 stories on the eve of my birthday turned into 6 years.
My mom funded and fostered whatever ideas I threw at her so I could stay out of the line of fire. My dad anchored me. Without them, I’m my worst demons and vices firing on all cylinders at once. The principal’s wife and others have tried to pick up the reins and make the robot do certain things that they believe are the right path. The thing is that I am programmed to default to destruction because I’m meant to own a bourbon bar in New Orleans and they just haven’t accepted that yet.
I am now 15 miles away from Hollywood. The only hiccup was the recent inability to identify the poker hand. I can’t play at a table if I don’t know the dealer. The dealer is the one who sets up the play and I do my part if it’s explained to me. I don’t care who feeds me, just make it obvious because my owe list is a little long and I lack empathy.
My hand? I have about mid-five figures in credit cards that if someone could wipe out without me having to spend the next two years being a responsible adult so I can refinance and wash those mistakes away, by all means, what can my creativity do for you? That kind of luck ran out with my parents, but for a single night in West Hollywood, it felt like my dad was still alive and everything was going to be okay. A stupid clerical error made it seem like I had walked out of another fuck-up.
A member of the wellness brigade laughed as she lit another cigarette. “You thought you had lucked into a windfall that would never end and the first thing you do is go see Andy Garcia with your best friend, that is such a Sabrina thing to do.” Yeah, it is, but it has roots.
That best friend showed up at my house the morning of my father’s funeral with a bruised jaw and a bloody nose. It had been a bad week for everyone with my dad’s passing. I handed her something cold from the freezer and couldn’t process what was happening in real-time. “I’d never miss your dad’s funeral, dude.” She then spent that afternoon pretending to be the funeral director and telling every Tongan who tried to take pictures that photos weren’t allowed and they weren’t allowed to kiss my dad. I had two people who belonged to me, and they loved me and took care of me, and then I have this one friend who will do anything for me.
I gotta get prepped for St. Paddy’s weekend with my friend. Tommy Shelby is who she and I look up to other than Ginger from Casino. Ginger is an easy one, if you can be Sharon Stone, by God, be Sharon Stone. Shelby? We relate to him because he has PTSD and is self-destructive. He gets things done, but it’s always by chance, he wasn’t there to accomplish anything, he was there chasing death.
Which leads to the art of Selene. The moon goddess is looked at as the controller of the ocean and night thoughts, but the artwork that I gravitate to is because I think Selene is simultaneously the goddess of death. Death and art are entwined and any time the art depicts the intricacies of that, I like it. It freaked my aunt out when she saw it on our video call the other day so I guess the wellness brigade won’t stop for a while.
In all the chaos, one thing struck my friend and I. I was never harmed. I don’t think that was by accident. Interesting. Whatever it was about, take my word for it, I’m not worth saving and I’m bad at completing projects. The brains and heart of the operation are gone. The only thing left is a train off the rails that maybe has one last lucky hand to get something published, but it’s to get a bar in New Orleans.