Boxing up The Past…

There is something so specific about choosing to be an artist as your vocation, particularly when you are a writer and a woman. Thoughts and feelings cannot be discounted if you want to succeed at your craft. As a screenwriter, I was forced to explore all of my feelings as though they were color coded and lined perfectly in place like crayons in the fancy Crayola box with the built in sharpener on the side. You can’t be precious about somebody calling you “crazy” based on your self expression; that stuff is monetized and for sale to the highest bidder in your world. You should be ripping your skin off to present your heart to the world if you want the material to resonate across times zones. It’s not like choosing to be a lawyer or a doctor where you can have emotional issues come up, but are still expected to defend or to operate on a linear plane. A writer cannot operate if she is forced to defend how she is feeling, dissect what is hurting to fit in with everybody else’s non professional self expression, and to pretend like everything is okay to conform to societal expectation and norms. He wanted me to pretend or maybe it was him lying to himself. Whatever actually happened, (because I only know and can recount my side of how things went down) the collateral damage was that I electively gave up my career by putting my talent away in a box like a memento to be taken out during the high holidays. A part of me died a decade ago and only now, post fires, am I realizing it was the most integral part of my being that I have to fight with myself to reclaim.

Let me clarify a couple of things here: this wasn’t a “relationship” that sprung up in my adulthood or from the requisite left or right swipe on a dating site. I have known and been intimidated by this guy since I was 8 to his 11. He was tall, blond, and an Alpha boy before growing into his adult counterpart. The only sign that he wasn’t the perfect specimen in intellect and stature was in the way his lip was torn. I was 8 and didn’t realize that was called a cleft palette; I thought this slight imperfection made him tough like a superhero and only Yahweh knows what he thought about this birth right/write. Anyway, he was forceful in his intelligence, light years ahead of other children and he had a domineering personality that scared me because I was desperate for his approval. In middle age, I realize that had a lot to do with my father, who was and is a genius in his own right. My father was equally dismissive because he needed intellectual stimulation a child couldn’t provide in her babbling. My father was the top of his class, University of London, Middlesex Hospital, born to the first female physician in The West Indies who, for kicks, when back to Harvard to get her MPH when she was the private physician to the Nawab’s (Hindi word for king in our once principality of India, Hyderabad) granddaughter. For the record, I am NOTHING like these people in intellect as evidenced by the “F” I earned in AP Calculus at Pali High. But, I digress…

An example of my history with this person is highlighted perfectly in an incident from childhood. Sandwiched between two brothers, I was the ultimate tomboy. Unfortunately, only my brother was afforded a baseball glove since it wasn’t really my sport, yet I was included in a pick up game on Pinto Lane, the very street where this boy lived. We were on the same team and I remember him barking at me to get into the game as I tended to daydream my little stories back then as well. The ball was pitched, the batter met it with such force that when it was headed toward me, my instinct was to stop it. And I did. With my bare hand. The pain was hot and excruciating and I was close to tears before he ran over to me to determine the extent of my injuries. I was afraid to cry in front of him that’s what I was. I don’t know why he thought he was a doctor, but he took my hand in his and examined my fingers. His professional opinion was that I was fine, nothing was broken, and he advised that I get back into the game. And so I did…

And when I was 13 to his 16, he was the assistant to my tennis coach’s at my weekly tennis clinics. He fed the balls and had an air that he was Billie John King on the court. He could drive now, which made him feel like an adult when I was still in middle school, even though you had to manually roll down the windows on his red BMW. Between serves, he called himself “Hands” as a nickname to justify why he frequently massaged my neck and maybe why I was letting him. My bracelet broke when my wrist met my racket in response to a challenging shot and when I realized it was gone and started looking, he barked, “If your head wasn’t screwed on, you’d probably lose that, too.” Tough love?

Years past and we went our separate ways - I went to film school while he went on to conquer the world quite literally. A self made multimillionaire before he was 30 without a penny from his father and a retainer still in his mouth, he had become a producer with a very successful sitcom when NBC’s Thursday night lineup meant something in television. I was fumbling along in film school and had a beautiful boyfriend who would pick me up from school when he was at Pepperdine to have lunch in Beverly Hills. We were at The Cheesecake Factory where there are glass walls with a view to the outdoor patio and street and, at 26, I gasped as my 8 year old self once had in his presence. He was standing outside in a blazer and jeans on a clunky cell phone afforded to the masses in the 90s. My boyfriend asked who that was and I explained. My boyfriend had impeccable manners and insisted that I should wish the guy from my past, even though it had been close to a decade since we had seen each other. Excitedly, I walked outside and after saying hi effusively after years apart, the only thing he said to me was, “Firdosi, can’t you see I’m on the phone?” No explanation, no further details if it was Brandon Tartikoff or his mother on the other end of the call that was more important than an impromptu reunion with me…As usual…I’m not sure if we had cheesecake that day although I was svelte enough to indulge more than a slice back then…

And then life went on.

I got my masters, my swanky Hollywood job and several options on my scripts. I owned two properties on my own merit without the help of a husband, which honestly is the only thing I ever wanted (emotional support, not financial) because a good man is essential on the path to becoming a soccer mom. None of that happened the way I had hoped and scripted in my mind’s eye. My mother died tragically, I quit the only six figure position of its kind in Hollywood, and I waged war in a long, protracted legal battle with a sibling about an inheritance I never actually saw.

With no options in sight…

I took it back to the basics, but really what the hell was I thinking? I could support myself. But, how? I was only periodically selling scripts as I was married and living abroad in The UK: how I was going to keep my house was a mystery. But, I dug in. I didn’t want to let it go. My husband had two houses of his own in the UK, one being a grade 2 listed, which apparently is a big deal for the Brits. I was five months behind on my mortgage payments and hadn’t lived in Las Vegas full time since I was a teenager. I could envision growing a film industry there and was taking meetings with people like the late Tony Hsieh because he had similar, grandiose ideas. But, that was a long time away and it felt like I was going to lose the house before I could see my name up in lights in Sin City.

I hired a publicist and proceeded to write out my pain daily as though Facebook was theater in the round. Seated with her while strategizing my future, I received a message that simply said “Call me at the office, #, and his name” Oh my God! I was beside myself, shaking, leaving my publicist perplexed. All he said was to call him. No, he didn’t say that, read the subtext, I countered. He wants something he is saying a lot more than what is in this simple sentence…

And, in fact, he was. He wanted us to work together. He had an idea for a script he had been nursing since his sitcom days and he wanted me to write it with him. Wait, this is all a little heady. You want to trust me with one of your passion projects? Me? The chick you thought would lose her head if it wasn’t screwed on tightly? Yes, he offered, and later, down the line, he gave me the parameters.

Once a week I was to come to the office to share my pages. He was to pay me a monthly stipend for 12 months that barely covered the mortgage for 12 months, even though I insisted I could do this idea justice with a polish and then some in three months. At the end of the 12 months upon which he insisted, there would be a lump sum payment before we went out with the script whereupon we would be equal partners. A friend offered to drive me weekly to his office and he had a “better idea”. He generously offered to replace my broken down Jaguar that sat idle in my garage because I didn’t have the funds to fix it. While wildly generous of him to offer, I declined. Our friends would think I was his mistress if I was driving around in a car he purchased and I was respectful of both his marriage and mine. You don’t accept such gifts from a man, I thought, irrespective of our history…

Our history. I don’t think I realized how heavily that weighed on me. Here he was suddenly my boss and my partner and I don’t think I knew how to process his praise. All of his friends and contacts were world famous, successful people and he was treating me as though I was on that level when I never felt like that before in his world. He was blocking out meaningful time in his busy day for my musings and my thoughts and, in addition to that, it was a time of great vulnerability for me as I was in a bad marriage and estranged from my family for the first time in my existence.

Writing a script is a very intimate process when you are doing it with a partner. You have to strip away everything you present to the planet to effectively examine the rawest of emotions and, in the case of our script, the subject matter was very close to what I was going through in my real life. In my reel life, the lead was a mother in a coma who was dying as her fractured family was forced to come together. I don’t know. I was uncomfortable with him believing in me when he had never shown signs of that by so deeply involving me in his life. This discomfort hit its high when he shared with me that he shared our pages with his friend, the musician and well known intellect, Roland Orzabel of Tears for Fears who he said marveled at my talent, even though he promised he wouldn’t show anybody the script until completion.

Where it all fell apart for me was at Starbucks. Bizarrely, a lot of my big moments have happened over a Frappuccino I didn’t order. His executive assistant called and instructed me not to come to the office; he was going to walk over to the chosen location. Through the glass walls, I watched him approaching. I hadn’t seen him in several weeks and he was donning a beard. He looked so handsome yet forlorn, I thought to myself. When he sat down, he shared that his father’s cancer (who had been an enormous presence in his life) had returned and his oncologist had advised he had but weeks to live. I was saddened and my natural instinct was to embrace his sadness the way I had done eight years before with my own mother’s untimely cancer death. I was supportive and suggested that we put the script away until he felt well enough to proceed. His approach was the complete opposite. He said (and I’m not sure if it was him or the grief speaking) that the script was super important to him and that the only change he wanted to make to our working relationship was he no longer wanted to limit things to one hour once a week. He wanted to throw himself into the script, which I didn’t think was such a good idea. He said we were starting in three days on the Saturday. He was going to pick me up at the house and we were going to go to some undisclosed location or his house or somewhere (he didn’t tell me where) to spend the day working. My response to this suggestion?

I went home and called my husband with whom I was currently separated.

“Sahir, I have a problem.”

“Oh?”

“X wants to spend Saturday together working on the script.”

“That’s your job isn’t it?”

“Working together? When he’s grieving the pending death of his father? I am actually scared, Sahir, because I think I love him and I want to be there for him, but it’s wildly inappropriate for me to be there when he’s so vulnerable and he and I both are married.”

Dead silence before my husband broke out into hysterical laughter

“You honestly believe you’re attractive to him as a woman? You’re his employee. You are 44 to his 30 year old wife, I guarantee that’s not what he’s thinking…”

“Sahir, how many men do you know want to be around their writing partners at the worst time in their lives? He needs me and I need to be needed. I want somebody to share their every emotion with me, I have loved and respected him since childhood, do you have any idea how wrong it is what I am feeling for him and how over our marriage is that I am having this conversation with you?”

“If you want to keep your house, I suggest you stop flattering yourself, stop flirting and get back to work…”

He didn’t come to pick me up that Saturday even though he called four times, confirming the gate code, telling me to wait for him. His father died unexpectedly on that Saturday, so the day was canceled. But, I couldn’t cancel as hard as I tried how terribly I felt about my feelings and the closeness I shared with him so I did what came naturally to me: I ran. I quit the project. And I sold the house. I boxed up my shame and my heartbreak. And I stopped writing…

Until now.

I felt so poorly about myself for what happened, for quitting the last writing project I had, for developing feelings when I was vulnerable to approval. I still beat myself up for the estrangement with a life long friend where nothing happened that either one of us need to feel apologetic about.

Six years ago, I had my cousin reach out to him to offer an apology on my behalf. His response was that I was a fantastic writer and I should keep doing it with the caveat that he didn’t want to appear in my writing as he is both famous and private. But, I now have to write about him because post fires, one of the things that also went up in flames was my filter…

I had to reclaim my narrative so I am doing so, without using his name. Maybe I am maturing into the writer I always wanted to be…Maybe because I realize that my story is as important as his or anybody else’s…that realization is what every writer needs to live to know what to record for consumption…

So, I loved him with a sincere heart. He was lucky for it and I am better for feeling it.