Worry

When there are no numbers to call...

A rough excerpt from the memoir…walks in Griffith Park…

I used to worry more. I don't worry like I did to the verge of tears at every waking moment, hair on fire. Now it's more of an occasional low-level dread some days or sometimes not at all. I wouldn't be alive if I kept up the level I clutched in a vice grip in the early days. Worries kept me up at night, texting over and over, unanswered phone calls. Where are you? Over the years as the addiction sunk its claws into our lives, I became the brooding middle-aged Attila the Hun trying to do battle over the barbarians, and control the drugs, thinking I could banish the broken boys and girls hanging around our home. What a waste of time. Sometimes, I give my worries to my dogs - and they stay vigilant for me, dear Olive and Wilbur.

A long time ago, after another sleepless night, I was on a bright and early Griffith Park Sunday morning walk with my friend, Ellen, complaining about waiting up, vigilantly clocking each siren, surely heading our way, and Ellen said, “Staying awake won’t keep your boy alive.”

She said it matter-of-factly, and Ellen loved him dearly, so this was spoken with tremendous love, candor, and concern for a friend.

The first time I met Ellen was at the Bourgeois Pig on Franklin Avenue in Los Feliz. I made my son come with me because he was nine years old, and I didn't want to leave him home alone. Where was his little sister? I think she had a playdate. I was pregnant and tired, and I didn't even know Ellen, but a friend connected us, as Ellen had recently moved to LA with her husband.

Ellen emailed back a response to my invitation to meet for coffee: “Thanks for doing outreach,” which made me laugh. Our friend who connected was a fierce and funny woman Rochelle Distelheim from Chicago. Rochelle and I had met at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and she said, “I have a friend moving to LA, and I think you two would like each other.”

What a gift Rochelle gave us all those years ago.

I also recall my most hilarious friend, Diane, talking about Rochelle after a Rick Moody reading at Sewanee. Rochelle was in her seventies then, and she stretched, stood up post-reading, and shrugged. “Hmmm, kids love him,” she said, as fans communed around Moody.

Diane did such a spot-on impersonation of the brilliant Rochelle, she had us all laughing. I lost contact with Rochelle, but she wrote well into her nineties and published two books, the last one posthumously.

Once she visited me in Los Angeles and when I picked her up, she smiled and said, “Oh boy! Am I riding in the Kabballah van?”

I did some ghostwriting gigs that paid for our brown minivan, and I said to her, “You are indeed riding in the Kabballah van.”

I loved Rochelle. She wrote short stories and two novels: Sadie in Love and Jerusalem as a Second Language. She was so smart and brimmingly alive with curiosity and empathy how could I not take her advice and meet her friend Ellen?

Anyway, did I bribe my boy to come with me that day to meet Ellen? I think I said I would buy him a treat, but it was Ellen who treated him to cheesecake and a bottle of soda with a skull and crossbones that turned his teeth black. He was thrilled, and Ellen liked him from the start and even said, "Aw, I can't believe your mom dragged you along to meet her friend that she hasn't even met yet. I’m really sorry."

He smiled and I laughed.

When our youngest was born, Ellen would meet me for walks with the baby who grew out of the stroller fast and began to fuss and balk at walks up the trails of Griffith Park, so they made a pact. Ellen would carry Bo up the trail now, and when Ellen was old, Bo would carry Ellen. They even shook on it and carried carrots to feed the horses at the top of Runyon Canyon, Bo on Ellen’s back.

(A more recent walk from a few years ago with Ellen and Olive)

***

Staying awake won’t keep your boy alive.

But how was I to sleep in those days?

Nowadays, I sleep, mostly, although I sometimes wake up at three or four, and I’ll reach for my phone like you're not supposed to do. I’ll turn on Instagram in search of the words "Active three hours ago," "Active Today" or "Active Yesterday." When the days slip into weeks and only his name appears without any mention of my son’s activity that dumb old useless fear begins to scratch and hum.

That's when I might get scared to fall asleep. The hummingbird heart begins in my chest at 11:00 pm, so sometimes I take an over-the-counter sleeping pill, wishing it were a hammer to knock me cold until the morning light. I swap around and try each one on a different night, hoping to quell the fear - one night, two Tylenol PM. Another night, one Unisom or one Trazodone. Maybe a Cannabis-Infused Gummy.

Then I force myself to take nothing and deal with being awake, and by the third night, I can start to sleep again. Sometimes, I fall asleep listening to a story. Sometimes, my husband reads to me to sleep. He worries too. We only talk about it in short sentences while making supper.

            He hasn't called.

            Hasn't been online.

            Should we?

Sometimes, we are so ridiculously solicitous of each other’s worries that we overdo it…overthink it. A piece of paper fell between us last week, and we both leaned down so fast to retrieve it that we cracked our heads together.

Enough. Stop. Pause. Breathe.

And then our boy called his sister, and then he called us, and it was such a sweet relief. He wanted to talk about the Dodgers.

They’re winning! World Series time again!

He was checking in.

He’s here.

Hey Mama. Here’s my new phone number.

So many phones and numbers.

The Dodgers won the World Series the year he was born. I remember sitting at a tiny, round kitchen table in Hollywood, hugely pregnant, watching the Dodgers’ Parade on a teeny-tiny, black and white postage-stamp of a TV screen that was also part radio next to a red rotary phone that rang so loudly I sometimes unplugged it because I couldn’t lower the volume on the ringer.

We lived at 716 Valentino Place next door to Paramount Pictures, and Valentino’s ghost was rumored to haunt the halls and play tricks with the creaky birdcage elevator that was constantly breaking.

I worried then about having a baby. We had no health insurance. We paid a midwife out of pocket at the Natural Childbirth Institute in Culver City. Nancy McNeese. I adored her. I stared at the tiny TV of Dodgers celebrating in the fall of 1988, Tommy Lasorda in the thick of it. We’d only lived in LA for five months. How could I claim the Dodgers? But the baby I was carrying later claimed them and as a boy, he said he would grow up to one day own the team.

“That’s nice,” I told him.

Tommy Lasorda and my father, a football coach, who played baseball as a boy, died a day apart in 2021. Our boy took that as a sign to start playing baseball in earnest again. We began to meet him in parks near places he was staying so we could pitch the ball to him. We carried mitts and baseballs in the trunk just in case.

MESSENGER CHAT

Son: I love u I am in silverlake waiting on an imaginary bus

Me: Do you need a ride? Just let us know where you are if you need a ride.

Son: Ok. I am by the silverlake blvd exit on the 101