Mr. Nobody with Elle, her head in the clouds..

I feel so sad for this generation of kids, including the ones Allah said I could call my own. They have been cheated out of so much in the way of human interaction and experience, thanks to my younger brother, Hass’, brilliance.

That’s a bit of an exaggeration. I tend to get hyperbolic when I am punchy. The neighbor and her frivolous restraining order makes me wonder out loud how I will manage everything from laundry to coming out of my unit. But, I still have two more blessed and brilliant days at the safe house and I don’t want to waste a moment not being blissful. This is a time of celebration.

In two days, my younger brother will turn 48, which still makes me marvel how time speeds up and slows down like a Nissan 240 SX. An amazingly congenial and cerebral kind of guy, my brother dropped out of Pali High when The Palisades wasn’t smoldering in unimaginable ways. When he was 16, because structure and conformity could not contain his wickedly bright and sardonic brain, he needed to go to college to be challenged. His plans were thwarted by his long term lover who also failed to finish her vet studies in Colorado, but saddled my brother with paying down her errant student loans. I don’t know why he cares he doesn’t have a degree; kids today don’t know if they are coming or going and don’t dance, make out, and live with their hopes and dreams as supportive friends. My brother used to laugh heartily, and also could do the Carlton dance better than Alfonso Ribiero himself. But, what his girlfriend, Alethea, cheated him out of his agency by getting pregnant when he turned 21 because he said he needed to find himself after five years of her five years senior to his teenager control. That’s when his dreams were dashed. My nephew, Xade, wrote to me rather cheekily on his first day of Vassar after graduating that pointless school, Crossroads, (google Elon Musk opinion of the Santa Monica campus) that he had more of an eduction in a couple of hours than both parents had combined. Whoa…I thought clearly neither my sister in law nor my brother who was one of the creators of encoding, encryption, and compression had done right or write was instill a sense of humility in my nephew. Scratch that last sentence; it’s a judgment and not mine to make!!! My brother sat on the boards of Miramax Technicolor and Hulu because without his brain power there would be no way for Xade or his la di da friends to watch his movies on his phone. Why Alethea, a stay at home mom, didn’t notice AT TWELVE, Xade cited THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, as his favorite movie is beyond me and again none of my business save for I saw this declaration online. I was almost three times his age and I would pick my favorite movie as EIGHT BELOW, but that is also a biased thing to say. I would watch Paul Walker read the phone book for two hours in the darkened theater. Oh, a phone book is an oversized, yellow paged guide when people had landlines and a theater was a confined space where people had movie going experiences before my brother and his cohorts put the gift of cinema in the palms of people who had yet to graduate to such technology from pen to page to screen to smaller screen.

I mean, in that fantastic film, the dogs were alone in the Arctic, fighting for survival while my boyfriend was fighting to get back to them. I would expect no less from him cinematically or otherwise. I watched that movie a thousand times and wondered what could have been between us in terms of how many kids, much the same way I cried, clutching a copy of PEOPLE MAGAZINE in a UCLA bookstore North Campus at about 4 in the afternoon. It was as dark as the dawn, so many co-eds were going about their business not cognizant of the agony I was feeling as a gorilla in their midst (another oldie but goodie). November, 1993, publications (those are things called magazines Gen Z squared where you would have a tactile experience of taking it off a news stand before using your fingers to turn pages and not just one index finger to have the world at your disposal like an errant string of a kite you never learned how to fly. You youngsters should try a day without the phone and kite and see what kind of mischief you can get up to…fun stuff, nothing that could kill your dreams or innocence, said this geriatric Grandma Moses.

Pablo had been an actor since he was a young boy, much like River Phoenix. They had both started with lofty goals of supporting their families, who had more than one member/sibling who looked to those two boys (when we were all your age) to secure mortgages, pay for the younger siblings’ braces and hockey lessons, and to generally take it on the chin for somebody else’s expectations on their kind hearts, affability, and allegiance to the family structure. Just like my brother also experienced in the early days, only he was recruited and put to work by my sister in law’s mother, so that he could be a wage earner for the kids she produced that didn’t have the same talent as was in my brother’s fingers in coding, in River’s for how he sang on the street busking, and Pablo’s fingers for everything else important like running them through my hair, which lulled me into thinking we were forever. RIVER JUDE PHOENIX perished thanks to reckless friends, a speedball, and an inability to know what would kill him for celebrating HALLOWEEN, both a holiday and a franchise now owned by another former friend, Malek Akkad. Well, Malek has tragically inherited 52 percent of the multi billion dollar while one brother 16 percent, the stepmother 16 percent, and the rest goes to his nephews, who were tiny when their mother and Malek’s only sister, RIMA, was killed by a suicide bomber with their beloved father in AMMAN, JORDAN. This was yet another unbelievable tragedy to stomach. I attended UCLA Film which led to a job with the highly successful, Ron Bass. We were going to collaborate with the uber talented Zooey Deschanel (pre NEW GIRL and I live for Schmidt) when I got the call to go home immediately for what happened in Amman. I didn’t get to pick things up again with The Portrait of Madame X painting project we all wanted to make together (Zooey called herself Zuzu Sparkle) because my mother would be dead within the year and my step grandmother hating her so much let rigamortsis set in without closing her lifeless mouth. My mother was buried looking as though she was done in by Leaf (Joaquin) Phoenix’s Joker. But, there were happy times too with Pablo, the love of my life, until they weren’t.

Picture it: UCLA, THE SCULPTURE GARDEN, NOVEMBER 1998 (disclaimer: this could be pure fiction read it as you feel…) Elle and Mr. Nobody do their little dance on the grass of resting in each other’s embrace while the other students and faculty attend and they attend to each other.

“None of the horrible things you endured is going to happen with us, Dos.”

“Please, Pablo. Nobody at Original will even take my calls and Brad Luff claims to love me.”

“Why the hell do you care? The script doesn’t actually need a rewrite; it’s good to go. Aren’t you proud of me for even getting a movie about drift cars made? How many 20 somethings can say that?”

“Just you, baby. That’s why I want it to be perfect. You don’t need Tintoretto after this movie. And what the hell is the Pagoda style 7 11-”

“Shut up, Dos. I am not playing hookey from work to come here for you to give me an intellectual commentary on a movie that’s getting made-”

“Baby, which part of me wanting Mia to have her eyebrows done properly or for you to location scout another house is an insult? The house screams Depression era yet he doesn’t eat when his lesbian girlfriend asks him to and then he’s going to haul ass all the way out of another century to have lunch in Malibu at Neptune’s Net?

“I picked that because it’s something we were never able to afford between us-”

“I like a picnic and sharing Marmalade.”

“So, you say and yet you never have a weekend free anymore for the beach with me just decompression.”

Ignoring the reference to the good times lost-

“And, another thing, who the hell is going to believe this rag tag team of misfits with a friend named Bear would befriend a hottie like you without professional jealousy or that not one of them ever needs a pee break or a Snickers or to fill up GAS at Chevron to do all this high octane stuff.”

Pablo gets up in The Sculpture Garden, North Campus from the grass with an all too familiar irritation. BEAT

“Where are you going, baby? I still have six pages of ideas and I’m not done sucking face quite yet.”

“You’re done for the day. I don’t come out here when I could be in the ocean for you to kick shit at what I am doing for us.”

“Wait, same objective, different route. Who says I don’t want that too. Surely, you and Tintoretto don’t pump the brakes the same way or-”

“STOP IT, STOP IT, STOP IT.”

“You’re yelling, baby. People are looking.”

BEAT. He looks like he’s hit the speed limit on this, forcing his Converse on his feet with irrtation.

“People? Pseudo intellectuals like you? Baby, fuck you wanting to be a working writer and righter after you graduate. Why don’t you follow all of those who can’t do teach and get tenure? We could count on some security in our 50s.”

“Why bother? You’re not giving me security now. Sleeping with her after dinner when Dom doesn’t let you in the house without you offering the keys to your drift car.”

“It’s a fucking movie!!! Why are you being like this?”

“It’s not a movie, it feels like the end of us. And if what I fear is true, I want for continuity where I won’t get it from here on out. Your head is going to explode when you become a movie star.”

“Something to look forward to! It hasn’t exploded with you since you refused my proposal for yet more schooling. That’s what’s pulling us apart.”

I always hoped his head didn’t explode and he died instantaneously that wickedly cruel November Saturday after his REACH OUT WORLDWIDE event I wasn’t invited to. I was alone in a large golf course adjacent house, decompressing from the holiday when the news danced tauntingly across the television screen. I turned it off and thought I’m tired; I misheard; I can change the trajectory if I just pray and will for some other outcome that never came.

It’s THIRTEEN YEARS this December and I can’t say how I have grown from the agony of the most significant tragedy of my romantic life. But, it does make me feel hopeful for the next generation.

If they could just get off their phones and cop a squat to enjoy the beauty of nature, friendship, and possibility, then maybe writers/righters like me so exhausted from the challenges of natural disaster and fatal car accidents might have something to look forward to…your self discovery as we found ours so many impactful years before.