me’s blog

Five years already?  Seems like only yesterday.

It was September 2001, and I was visiting DC for the first time since moving to Los Angeles one year earlier.  The trip had been planned in advance, but unfortunately it ended up happening just as things really started to fall apart out there.  The straight-laced, reliable roommate I’d lived with since I got my two-bedroom apartment in LA had moved out a couple months earlier because he couldn’t live with a drug addict anymore.  An acquaintance of mine named Byron had moved in, and he was almost as sketchy as I was.  He’d paid for his part of the July rent, but it was the beginning of September when I came to visit DC, and by this point he hadn’t paid for his part of the August or September rent.  I don’t remember the specifics, but somehow I’d arranged for a relatively reliable girlfriend of mine named Jovette to go to my apartment while I was away, pick up at least one month’s rent from Byron, and deliver it to the realty company, in the hopes that this would keep things cool until I got back in town.

So I was in DC, staying at my sister Amy’s apartment in Arlington, and the plan was for me to fly back on Tuesday morning.  She wanted me to get an early morning flight so that she could drop me off on her way to work.  Being the self-centered irresponsible drug addict I was at the time, I told her there was no way I was going to be awake in time to catch an early morning flight.  I booked a flight for Tuesday afternoon, and she agreed to leave work early to get me to the airport.

I woke up Tuesday morning in her apartment to the sound of her phone ringing incessantly.  I saw it was Amy calling from work, so I rolled out of bed and answered the phone.  I remember her first words were "Um, you’re not going anywhere today."  I was all, "Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis?"  She told me to turn on the tv.

Something like a dozen or so planes were missing.  Missing?  What the fuck?  Then I think one of the planes hit one of the towers, and then the Pentagon, and then Randomsville, PA, and while I don’t remember the exact chronology, I do remember being completely terrified and being glued to the somewhat comforting tones of Peter Jennings pretty much 24/7 the following week.  The Pentagon was only a couple miles from my sister’s apartment, and I remember everyone being kind of paralyzed, not wanting to leave their houses, not knowing what had just happened, or what was going to happen next.  It was as though time stopped for a week.

I have a very distinct memory of one night when there was some sort of planned vigil or something where everyone went out on their balconies, hung a flag, and lit a candle.  I remember feeling that it was the first time I’d ever felt the word "patriotic" actually held some sort of significant meaning to me.  That feeling has since faded.  I also remember (and doubt I will ever forget) that the initial plan was for me to be on a cross-country flight on the morning of September 11 from Washington Dulles to LAX.  Two such flights were among the ones that crashed.  If making my sister’s life a little bit easier had actually mattered to me at that point in time, and/or if I had been one of those drug addicts who’s also a morning person (do they exist?), I most assuredly would have been on one of those flights.

Oh that’s the other thing.  Since all air transportation was halted for over a week, I was stuck in DC for a while.  That was okay with me, because it wasn’t as though I had a job or anything to get back to in LA.  However, because I hadn’t exactly foreseen 9/11 occurring when packing for my little east coast visit, by that point my drug stash had been depleted and could not easily be replenished, especially since the whole city was basically shut down and I was at my sister’s place in nearby Arlington.  Not catastrophic, ‘cuz I’d run out of drugs before, but it definitely added to the already uncomfortable weirdness in my world that week.  Then once air transportation finally started back up again, I - like most Americans - was understandably terrified to get onto a plane and fly across the country.  Back then, it seemed as though every flight could be the last.

Eventually though, I did manage to muster up enough balls to return to my own private hell in LA.  I remember Al Gore was on my flight.  That was definitely reassuring.  And we all cheered passionately upon touching down safely at LAX.  If only I’d known what I was returning to…

First of all, the one job-ish thing I had going for me in LA was that I would play piano a couple nights a week for tips only at a poorly-attended restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard.  Well, somehow they’d gotten word that I was supposed to be flying back to LA from DC on the morning of September 11, and since they hadn’t heard anything from me for weeks after, the alcoholic owner of the restaurant had gathered the staff together to announce to them that I was dead.  I will never forget the range of emotions that greeted me when I showed up at the restaurant a few nights after my return.  It was as though Elvis had entered the building.  People burst into tears when they saw me, one guy even handed me a poem he’d written about my death.  These were people I didn’t even know that well.  That felt amazing.  Weird, but amazing.  But of course, I was returning to some not-so-amazing stuff as well.

I’d spoken with my friend Jovette a few times before leaving DC, and she’d told me that she had gone over to my apartment a few times to try to get some rent from my sketchy roommate Byron, but the door had been locked from the inside (which meant he was there) and he wasn’t responding to her repeated knocks and phone calls.  When I finally arrived back in LA and walked into my apartment, I saw that Byron and all of his belongings had disappeared.  He hadn’t taken anything of mine, but I did find something sitting on the floor by the door.  It was an eviction notice.  It had been left there during the first week of September, and by the time I was able to get back to LA, the time period during which I was allowed to respond to the notice had already expired.  Bad news.

Somehow, perhaps because of the heady brew of my undeniable charm, my persuasively pathetic begging, and yet another bail-Matt-out check from the aptly named Bailer family (plus the rather extraordinary circumstances surrounding 9/11), I managed to finagle my way out of that eviction.  I found a new roommate - an even sketchier mess named Todd who disappeared without paying rent just before November 1.  There was no way I could come up with the other half of the rent this time.  All my cards had been played.  That next eviction notice stuck.  I was in eviction court on Christmas Eve 2001, and the cops came to remove me from the premises on Valentine’s Eve 2002.  That’s when I moved into my car.  Wake up call?  You’d think.  But it took almost another whole year until I hit rock bottom, got arrested, and started getting sober.

At some point during the eviction process, I learned that several hundred dollars in phone calls from pay-phones had been charged to my home phone using some calling card that Byron had set up before he disappeared.  And Todd had found a checkbook that I’d hidden in my room and, shortly after his own disappearance, he’d written a few checks from my account for a couple hundred dollars each, all of which bounced - DUH!  That was my choice of a roommate.  Someone who didn’t realize the impracticality of stealing a checkbook from a jobless, penniless drug addict who was basically living from eviction notice to eviction notice.  Me, I was bankrupt on the inside and decaying on the outside.  I hope that I never forget that feeling.  Writing this has helped me remember a lot of things I’d tried to forget.  Because my oh my, how the times have changed…

Only five years?  Seems like a lifetime ago.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 11:47 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.