51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

And then they all try to set me up with their new boyfriend’s best friend.
     
    Doug and I meet in Silver Lake. It doesn’t take long for us to start discussing who we are and where we have been. Doug explains that he started out as an actor but then he began managing a bar ten years ago.
     
    “It’s weird,” he tells me. “I just started doing it, and I realized a few years ago that I loved it. I love taking care of people. So why stop?”
     
    There is something so refreshing in that statement that Doug becomes more attractive by the confession. And Doug is relatively attractive. Although he is in the transition stage of going from a thin-haired man in his thirties to a bald man in his forties, he looks a bit like many of the soap opera stars on whom I had a crush when I was a kid. I can imagine being eight, watching daytime TV during summer vacation, and drooling over the likes of a young Doug.
     
    Doug tells me that he was born and raised in L.A. He laughs, “I know. There are only a few of us.”
     
    People from L.A. always tell that to transplants like me. Mimi once told me that she and a guy named Phil Bower are the only native Los Angelenos in the city. But that is another Los Angeles myth because there is an enormous number of people who are born, raised, and never leave here. And I understand. When you have seventeen different universes all within the space of one city, why bother?
     
    But the one thing we all ultimately do is leave Hollywood. The big dream. The song and the dance. The famous hookups and the belief that we could have been a star. Whether you were raised here or not, this might be a town of broken dreams, but at one point, we all had one that was alive and well.
     
    I find out that acting isn’t the only dream Doug has lost. As he gets quiet and explains that he is still taking care of the cats he ended up with from a divorce a few years back, I sense another stalled hope in Doug’s story. I can see why giving up acting might not have seemed like such a sacrifice set against a happy marriage, and why now, in its failure, there is the feeling that much more was lost than just a relationship. Doug doesn’t go into details, refers to the whole thing as back story, but I know what back story is. Back story is when the wife leaves you and the pets, and then you’re a single dude with three cats.
     
    He smiles sadly and says, “As much as I love them, I have to say, they’re getting old. And I’m kinda looking forward to traveling freely without always having to find someone to take care of them.”
     
    I am sure in their passing, those cats will give him more than just physical freedom. I can see that it takes a long time for the wounds of divorce to heal, and even longer for the scar to fade. And though I might have watched women fall in love, marry, go through divorce, and fall in love again, maybe I’ve been lucky that I have been spared that pain. I so often think of marriage as the ultimate prize that I forget it’s not necessarily permanent. And might not actually be the dream to which I have pinned so many hopes.
     
    Doug and I have a nice enough dinner. It’s a little loud in the restaurant, and he’s kind of a low talker, and I am kind of a little deaf, this makes me nod and smile a lot. But maybe that’s better. I tell him how one day I hope to be a writer—that I have loved books since before I could read.
     
    “So, you’re really smart, huh?” he asks.
     
    I want to say: Yes, I am . And you have no idea what a pain in the ass that is. Back in 2002 when I moved to Hollywood, I once had my own starstruck dream. Long before I found myself answering phones at a nonprofit downtown, I thought I was going to make it big. I moved out to L.A. with one screenplay, half a novel, and a laptop. I thought that between the jacaranda trees and the Hollywood sign and the lights of the Sunset Strip that some kind of fame might be mine. After two years in Los Angeles, I met and