Category Archives: Non-fiction

Non-fiction

Self-Taught

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My writing has been self-taught, except for a few screenwriting classes at universities. I read many creative writing books and committed many hours of intensive labor but never set foot in one of those creative writing classes.

A friend of mine once set me up to audit a screenwriting class at UCLA sometime in my twenties. That’s right. It was free to sit among pursuers of a Master’s degree. It felt like winning a lottery. What was the professor’s name? Anyway, she taught us the rules of screenwriting. This was before my dive into the creative writing books and before my collaboration with an ambitious soul.

The class hated me. They knew what was up. The students would comment on each other’s work, but when it came to my turn, one of the women said to me, “I’m sorry, but I just didn’t have time to read it.”

I didn’t understand what she meant. She’d had time to read everyone else’s work.

My psychiatrist said, “You know what that means?” He raised his middle finger at me. “It means fuck you. I paid for this class, and you didn’t.”

She’d offended me. But that didn’t stop me from attending the classes.

At the end of the semester, the professor called me into her office. I was excited to hear what she had to say.

“Throw all of it away,” she said.

I’d completed the first draft and spent all those hours, and there she was, telling me to throw it all away and start over. It hurt.

The rewrite never happened. I moved on to another script, one that didn’t make me cringe.

Then, the ambitious soul came into the picture. He found me online somehow.

“I got this idea, based on a book series about marines in space. I need someone to help me write the scripts.”

The idea was silly to me, but dollar signs were in my eyes. This guy really saw potential for a franchise to start based on these books that were written.

So we began our journey through the script about marines in space. The characters were stereotypes to the ninth degree. You had the cigar-chewing colonel, the tough-as-nails female officer, the Native American lieutenant who shot flaming arrows with his bow (in space), among other flat characters.

“Can I use a pen name?” I asked the guy.

“For what?”

What was there to say? He couldn’t hear about my embarrassment about the project. He was too prideful about it. He grew up reading the book series as a kid.

We even met the book series creator in Florida, where my partner also lived. The creator was an old man who lived in a meager house with dirt and trash everywhere. He was a sexist ex-marine who called all women mercenaries.

The project did go somewhere, just not all the way. Cable networks were interested; actors whom my writing partner had handpicked were interested. He even had a university art department sketching the storyboards. Everything fell in line, but it came up short after our agent dumped us. He saw the potential disintegrate, and so did my faith.

My writing partner and I stopped talking after about ten years of communicating and writing new drafts of the same old script and sequels. It was tiresome. One day, it was a film idea; the next day, it would be a possible TV series. It was Screenwriting 101 to me. Forget about the class at UCLA. It taught me not only the creative but also the business side of things, and it made me jaded. Industry people were flaky. Besides, there was no more belief in the project, and there wasn’t much belief to begin with.

As I’d said, this was just an education. I wanted to focus on my personal projects. Eventually, my enthusiasm for screenplays would die, and I would put forth my energy toward a manuscript, which took seven years to write.

I wrote my final screenplay in 2018, but after my friend wouldn’t read it, which was another problem (finding readers), I decided to give up. Now, I write nothing but short stories because I have no more novel ideas.

Should I take a creative writing class? What about a writer’s group? A therapist told me to join one, which made me skeptical, not about him but about groups, maybe because of my fear of judgment. What if their work is way better than mine, and I don’t belong there? Or the opposite. What if my work is better, and theirs is trash?

Anyway, I shall continue my journey through autodidactism, a word I learned from Hemingway. Who needs a school when there’s a wealth of knowledge on the bookshelves and the real world?

Non-fiction

The Bargoyles

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Mike would come in every night before everyone else did. He called our crew the Bargoyles because it was the same cast of characters. There were me, Mike, Sean, Ethan, and a couple of others I never knew the names of. We all sat at the end of the bar.

The bartenders hated us because we were the first ones in and the last ones out, and we were hogging up space for the other patrons.

Mike would get the drunkest. He drank Jack and Cokes all night, using red straws to count how many he’d drunk because he would lose count. The bartenders couldn’t stand him, especially because he would play the same damn songs on the jukebox. The jukebox was a digital one, not the retro kind where an actual record would pull up. You would use a phone app to play the songs. This gave Mike more wherewithal from his bar stool.

“Don’t you have anything else to play?” the bartender said to him.

The bartender wanted to listen to hip-hop or something more uptempo.

Mike’s songs were sad. They had to do with drug abuse, loneliness, or heartache. I didn’t mind the songs, but after a while of him playing them every night, I could understand the bartender’s point of view.

“You’re driving away customers,” he said. “My customers.”

“But we’re the Bargoyles,” Mike said.

He even bought us blue t-shirts with the word Bargoyles on them and actually wanted us to wear them. It was a joke—an unfunny joke. If we didn’t wear them, we weren’t part of the Bargoyles. And he bought drinks for only the Bargoyles.

But enough about them.

Mike illustrated comic books with his talent until one day. He was laid off by a couple of dude-bros who’d taken over his company once the founder had died. So now Mike’s drinking got worse. Not only was he at the bar before the rest of the Bargoyles, but he was at the bar when it opened. And he would stay until it closed. When it closed, the Bargoyles were the only ones who stuck around after hours.

I didn’t hold onto many memories of those nights because I would black out. Mike would order shots of whiskey for me and the rest of us. I would wake up with nasty hangovers and forget how I got home.

It was the only place I wanted to be after leaving my lousy job until one day I stopped going.

I was forced into rehab at forty-one. I never said goodbye to the Bargoyles. They heard about what happened to me through social media. Rehabilitation took a month before I was released.

I wouldn’t go back to the bar on La Brea, but I learned that Mike would move back to Connecticut. No more sappy songs. No more Bargoyles. The band would break up. I almost felt like the nucleus—the cause of their breakup.

The bar burned down while I was gone, too. They changed ownership and gave it a new name. This all happened during that month as if the world had turned upside down. Every time I hear those songs, I think of Mike and the Bargoyles and how much I miss drinking. I’ll walk by bars and poke my head in, wondering if I should have just one innocent pint of beer. But I know one would turn into two, that two would turn into four, that four would turn into eight….

I keep walking with those songs in my head.

Non-fiction

The Snow in California

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When it rains in Southern California, the citizens don’t know how to react. But when it snows, everyone freezes along with the temperature. It hasn’t snowed in Los Angeles since the early sixties. And it rarely snows in Central California, where most of my family lives.

Back in 2018, it snowed in Bakersfield on the day or so after Christmas. I had to drive back to Hollywood that day. The 99 was closed, going up the grapevine, and that was my usual route. So I had to take a detour up through Tehachapi, where the snow had to be about five inches deep.

I stopped to get gas and almost slid to the ground when I reached for the pump.

It was a three-hour stall just getting there. I’d never seen anything like it in my life except for when I used to live in Pittsburgh for five years, where I expected snow every winter. But that was when I was a child. I was forty-one when I was stuck up in Tehachapi. It would take seven hours to get back to my apartment.

When the traffic finally cleared up, I split onto the 14 freeway toward Lancaster. The road was icy, and diesels surrounded me.

I drove at about fifty miles per hour and tried to glide easily across the ice. Then, at some point, I slid across a sheet, and instinctively, I slammed the brakes. My car spun around like a dreidel. I thought I was going to die, but I didn’t. My Hyundai stopped spinning after about three revolutions, and I continued forward without a bruise or a scratch. But my heart was still thundering. I didn’t want to die that way.

I finally made it home at about eight at night after a seven-hour journey through the mountains. I turned on the heater in my studio apartment and watched a movie on Netflix. It wasn’t snowing in Los Angeles. Hell, it wasn’t even raining. It was just cold and dry like it usually is in December. But I’ll never forget the time on the 14 when I almost slid to my death.

Non-fiction

“What’s On Tonight?”

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I haven’t watched television since 2003. That’s not true. I’ll watch it from time to time when I’m with my parents because they’re television junkies. They watch all the shows, from Netflix to Amazon, but they stay away from the networks. The programming is just too awful.

I’ll watch TV with a zombie affect, not laughing, smiling, or crying. It dumbs me down, which was what made me quit so long ago. I used to get angry at the shows and the commercials, especially the commercials. They’re always louder than the programs on purpose.

I quit it for many reasons. I decided to start writing, and television corrupted my mind. All those reality shows made me rot away. I could feel myself shrinking into the couch. It also made me snack too much. I would eat chips, popcorn, and pizza and never get up from where I was sitting.

My mother would say, “Go out there and play some tennis why don’t you?”

“But Mom, I’m watching Fear Factor.”

Or “Mom, I’m watching MTV.”

I used to be an MTV freak back when they were still showing music videos. They quit doing that, yet they still call it Music Television. Don’t ask.

The Food Network has shows that don’t feature food.

The Travel Network has shows that have nothing to do with travel.

AMC, which stands for American Movie Classics, has shows that have nothing to do with American movie classics.

I don’t care enough to know the reason. Just change the name.

I used to watch IFC (Independent Film Channel) because I was a buff for independent films. Now I hear they don’t do that anymore.

Television is just a waste of time. I could be outside, petting other peoples’ dogs, or playing tennis like my mother wanted me to do.

When I was a teenager, I used to watch all the dumb shows for teens, like Saved by the Bell, a sitcom I watched every day after school and never laughed once. Or Beverly Hills, 90210. I knew all the episodes by heart because they would show the reruns ad nauseam, but it didn’t matter. I had a crush on the girls on those shows, so I would just stare at their beauty.

Of course, when I was younger than that, I would watch Hanna Barbara and Looney Tunes cartoons, not the garbage cartoons with amateurish animations they show now. I lived and died by the television, but I swore it off at twenty-six years old, like a vegetarian with meat. It was no good for me anymore.

If I were to be serious, I couldn’t let it rot my brain. Now, people come up to me.

“Dude, you gotta watch this new show… and this show… and this show…”

I had to compile a list in my brain.

They have all the streaming platforms, which is another beef I have with television. The only reason I have Amazon Prime is because I use it to go shopping. I don’t actually watch the shows.

I have a long list of books I want to read before I die. It might take me until old age to finish it, and I won’t get there if I keep watching television.

Maybe one day I’ll give up and watch it again. Then I’ll have something to talk about with people because it seems that’s all they want to do. I feel left out when they mention their favorite shows and discuss the episodes. And I feel like a snob when I tell them that I don’t watch television.

That’s not true. I watch YouTube, but that’s different. I can type in whales in the search bar, and a bunch of whale videos will show up in the results. That’s different from Jimmy Kimmel.

When I was young, I predicted this would happen. In the future, everyone will have their own TV channel. Well, I don’t. I’m too lazy. Besides, I don’t have any content. I could present my apartment, including the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom, and which toothpaste I use. Other than that, there isn’t much to show.

Non-fiction

Why Not?

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I haven’t received a rejection letter in almost ten years. Or maybe it was over ten years. I can’t remember. I know it was when my old psychiatrist was still alive because he scolded me for not sending out proposals. I was too afraid of rejection, and I still am.

It was for a manuscript that began as a memoir. I sent it out to over forty literary agents and received about five rejection emails. Most of them were generic. Actually, all of them were. The rest weren’t even responses.

I knew it was coming, so my new plan was to hire an editor. A writer for the Los Angeles Times told me that I shouldn’t pay for one, but he was out of touch. All amateur and professional writers need professional editors to keep a second eye on their material.

But anyway, I hired an editor for the manuscript, which I’d written for seven years—seven years of rewrites. After the editor tore it apart and told me that it needed a theme (which befuddled me), I wrote it once again for another year, and it turned into a surrealistic science fiction story that didn’t make any sense. I didn’t dare send it out to the public because it would be too embarrassing.

So now it sits on the shelf in my closet in one of those plastic boxes. I use plastic boxes now instead of cardboard boxes because of a bed bug infestation last year, and I heard that bed bugs could hide in cardboard.

But I digress.

My father knew someone whose daughter was supposed to be a high-profile editor in New York, and that person wanted me to connect with her. From what I heard, the agent begrudgingly agreed to do it. She sent me an email asking if I had any questions. I divulged to her everything that had happened in my writing pursuit. She responded coldly, basically saying that if I couldn’t handle the process, I should find something else to do. It crushed me, my only chance at something that could’ve changed my life for the better.

I gave up after that email.

That same year, I ended up in a psych ward, rehab, and recovery. I won’t say those two are connected, but they might be, along with my mother’s back surgery that same year, when I witnessed her anesthetized in the hospital for a whole week. I bawled outside where no one could see me. My psychiatrist was dead by then.

Ever since that email, I haven’t wanted any help from an agent. I’ve decided on the self-publishing route. It seems to be the only way to go, even when everyone else is doing it. I’m just another one out of millions. Oh well. Life is hard. What can I do?

It’s even more difficult to self-publish. There are all these different things I have to do for the book to come out right. I don’t want it to look amateurish like so many of those other self-published books. I’m not a book designer. All I can cling to is hope.

Non-fiction

Last Call

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Never in my wildest dreams, when I played at recess, did I think, someday, I’m going to sit in a bar every night until closing time. I thought I would be a superhero. If not a superhero, I would be a baseball champion, pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates, the youngest pitcher to ever grace the mound. I used to daydream about that when I stared out the window in class, only for the teacher to send me to the principal for not paying attention. They put me in other classes, separate from the normies.

I grew older, and the baseball dream was zapped like the acne on my face from my dermatologist.

Soon after I became an adult, a woman I was dating introduced me to bars. I would drink into blackouts. The baseball dream may have gone, but I had other dreams of becoming rich. Those dreams faded, too.

Next thing I knew, I heard the bartender shout, “Last call!” The music shut off. The bartender switched on the light and exposed our drunk faces, which was never a pretty sight. We all had to pay up. He gave us freebies on the house. I would get deals because I went there every night and blacked out at some point. The bouncer used to smoke with me out front before marijuana became legal.

Everyone would wait for me to show up. I was the staple of that bar. They should’ve named it after me: Ben’s Hideout. But that never happened. I would’ve loved to have had a bar named after me and have my picture on the wall, so people, decades later, would see who the best customer was in the early part of the century. The picture would’ve been framed, with me in front of a group of regulars.

There was one time, when I blacked out and ended up at the bar in Hollywood, not knowing how I got there. I called my buddy from work, who’d driven me after the work party.

“What the hell happened last night?” I said.

“Oh, we ended up at your watering hole, and you fell asleep at the counter.”

“I was afraid of that,” I said.

“You climbed onto the counter and slept there.”

“No, I didn’t. And they let me?”

“They let you until closing time.”

I went there the night after he’d told me, just to confirm that it happened and that I wasn’t booted out permanently. And my favorite bartender said, “Yes, you did.” That was when I knew I owned the place. The scariest part about that particular blackout was that when I awoke the next morning with a wicked hangover, I saw everything in the right place. My shoes were exactly where I always put them. The same with my wallet, my keys, my clothes. None of it was scattered or missing. It was like my unconscious had navigated me through it all.

That happened over six years ago. Ancient times. I don’t drink anymore after having gone through it all–rehab, recovery, outpatient—still as the same person. A part of me still wishes he was still doing it with the regulars.