I just moved from New York to LA. Again. It's been ten years since I left the Garden of Ego where way too many men and women look like post- surgery Meg Ryan which is why everyone air kisses here because lips that are pumped up like Ball Park Franks make actual contact both painful and challenging.
From the minute that I Post Valium tumbled off the plane I was the equivalent of a baffled East European tourist with black socks and orthopedic sandals, asking anyone who passed, "To where I go is Studio City?"
You are what you eat and I think you are where you live. Nest building does not happen overnight.
In my case I retreated to New York after a 25- year weekend in Los Angeles where I staffed on and co-created sitcoms. That kind of writing is not really writing. It's like throwing balls of Silly Putty against the comedy wall of desperation to pray that SOMETHING, ANYTHING sticks.
The one single emotion that drives this town is high octane fear.
Fear of rejection. Fear of unemployment. Fear that you are too old and irrelevant to the point of invisibility. Fear that you will be revealed to be a fraud. Fear that you will never arrive anywhere on time (not true if you leave four days in advance). Fear that your car is not nice enough. Fear that your house is not lush enough. Fear that you will lose and everyone else will win (the scorecard for that spectator sport are the Hollywood Reporter and Variety whose bold headlines are NEVER about you. Instead that seem to scream, in their best Rod Serling voice, "OBSOLETE!"
Back east I lived in the house of my closest friend long the Hudson River. I wrote in my local where-everyone-knows-your-name-and-order coffee shop (shout out to "Antoinettes").
I had friends who gathered around me like nursing puppies and man did that make me feel nurturing. I had a quiet attic office space on my house where all I could hear were the sounds of my own bent thoughts and the red faced, whistle blowing coach screeching obscenities at his football players in the high school field behind our house. That was like a Mozart Symphony to me...if Mozart was a tight end.
Someone has to come up with a rehab for LA behavior. Because when this Columbus arrived on the shores of Dobbs Ferry in search of a New World and a new life, I felt royalty entitled like I should be treated with the utmost admiration and respect because hey, I wrote on Fresh Prince, Full House and Mad About You, bitch!
Here is the thing: blue collar REAL people's lives just as important if not more than yours and virtually no one gives a flying fuck about your Hollywood veneer.
In other words: I was cut down to midget size in less than a day and brought immediately back down to mother earth.
And then I began to write. And I mean really, really write. I wrote plays. I wrote movies. I made two short films for the film festival world. I wrote books and stories.
And in the process I became more and more real myself. Empathetic. Transparent. Heartfelt. I became both David Write and David Soul.
None of those qualities are on anyone's IMDB out here because it's all about what you did tomorrow.
Not to be paranoid, you get an immediate sense that there is a secret coven gathering of Rosemary's Grown Up Babies who are gathered round their hoof for hands God, chanting your name, praying fervently for your imminent demise.
Here that is what you call Tuesday.
But this I know to be true:
Risk in the breakfast of champions and it is the single most important meal of your everyday life. Skip that meal and you are just fucked, inert and going nowhere like the end of the world evacuation traffic on the 405.
Part of my acknowledged (and admittedly defensive) skewered vision comes from having toiled in the real field of dreams for so many years, where, while I was far luckier than most, I was still unable to escape all the cackling, mini me Mr. Potter's out here who adore you as a child and despise you as a mature adult.
Everyone wants new and fresh here. We are all kale in nicer shoes.
There is plenty of work for fetuses or as they call them here: babies that are getting a little work done.
The big cosmic joke is that I have returned to co-launch a new series that I co-created with Mr. Sweetheart Famous Guy whom I have known for like 40 years. For this to happen at this stage of my life is beyond impossible. Trust me, odds are better that the Atlantic and Pacific oceans will swap places.
So this time around, armed with now years of alternative living experience and most of all having an unshakable inner core strength and virtually no desperation (emphasis on "virtually") I will prevail. My kids are here. Good friends are here. And, well, now I am.
This is still the home of the Gold Rush and temptation is EVERYWHERE but I am now armed with the will to maintain and preserve the foundation of who I am without trying to become a hula dancing assembly line native.
The film "Girl On A Train" was shot in my hometown (as was "The Leftovers") and directly out my apartment window I can see a huge movie billboard featuring Emily Blunt which has become uniquely comforting to me.
My super smart shrink pointed out the irony of it. It's like Big Sister from home is watching me, reminding me, just like in the book, that even though the narrator in me head can be unreliable than not, the truth is when you leave home, all you are looking for is home and maybe all you have to do is click your heels together three times and poof: there it is.
And there you will be. Forever.