Black Book

“Trouble, you’re trouble,” she said, scanning me like the fried shrimp on the buffet at Golden Corral. You regret it before you even put it on your plate. I wondered about the choice of Johnny Cash black, less a choice then a necessity. Sure, I had 20 grand in my pocket, but that’s about all I had. I’d never really understood the word empty before. I thought it was a temporary condition, like being out of food, or out of cash, or out of gas. But this empty wasn’t temporary. True empty is when there’s nothing to fill and nothing to fill it with. It’s blank. 

I missed the little black book. Back in the before times, I would have taken it out right there at the bar with a pen – one with a click top, those were my favorite to pilfer from the grocery store checkout or bank window – and written down what she said. I would have added something about the floor feeling sticky, and the bar, too. Tacky like wet Elmer’s glue, the kind I liked to roll between my fingers when I was a kid during arts and crafts. It was weird, but less gross than the kids who picked their noses and played with their own snot. 

But now the book was gone and I wondered if it had been worth it to let the fight go. Twenty grand and a producer credit on the DVD version of a theatrical flop of my stolen life. All those years of the black book, the diligent chronicling of every god damn thing that happened that was the least bit interesting, and now it was gone. And told so poorly. And worth so little. I tried not to take it personally, to remember that they told it all wrong. But still, it was my life up there, and nobody wanted to see it.

“Boring from the first credit to the last,” one critic said. “Who thought this was a movie worth making?” another asked. “Save yourself the 12 bucks and spend two hours with the dullest person you know.” I reminded myself it wasn’t my movie. It wasn’t even my story. That story was stolen from me. But it still stung. If I’m being honest, more than the lies, and the stealing the book, and the betrayal stung, the utter disinterest in my life - that hurt worse. But you can’t sue a bunch of people for hating a movie, so I sued my therapist instead. 

Well, I guess that was another big lie, Joel wasn’t really a therapist, but after five years of believing he was, telling him things like he was, paying him like he was, telling him about the black book like he was, it’s hard to let go of calling him my therapist. Even if in retrospect, telling me to continue to write it all down in the little black book was just self-serving and not the best advice. Even so, habits die hard. 

I went to Joel in the first place because of the habit of the black book. Habit is the wrong word. I guess it was a compulsion. Even that makes it sound like I had control over the thing. I didn’t. And that was starting to get in my way. It made everything much more time consuming, to have to write it all down. It was hard to be productive at work, so much time spent recounting what had just happened in the little black book. Dating, well forget it. Restaurants and time to talk was just impossible. Not just the weird lags in conversation to get it all in the book, but taking out the book itself was a deal breaker for most women. 

I confided in Joel that the book was getting in the way but that I couldn’t live without it. I mean literally, I was pretty sure when the words ran out that would be it for me. See, I had no memories of before the book and no family, at least not that I know of, to tell me about me before the book. There was nothing and then there was the book. And for every single thing that happened to me, it had my response, right in there. Like my life had been scripted. Before there were the words there was just a blank page. 

Joel was the one who told me to keep writing in the book. He coached me to tell people that I was working on a screenplay so I kept the book with me to write down ideas when they came to me and they just came to me a lot. Like Boswell and Johnson if I was both Boswell and Johnson someone said to me once. I wrote that down, along with my response “good one”. I think about it now, I was like a snake swallowing my own tail. But now, now that the book is gone, I’m like a shedded snake skin – dry and decaying. Soon I suppose I will be dust. 

People ask about your past all the time. It seems irrelevant to me since it’s done and gone, but they want to know where you grew up and how you grew up. They think it gives some insight into who you are now. I could’ve just shown them the book for insight, but Joel said that was a bad idea. That people would find it odd to hand it over as a “here, get to know me” gesture. I heard about these two women once who wanted to be friends but both were very busy with school and work, so they made tapes for one another telling all of their most important stories. They gamed the friendship system. I brought that up to Joel but he said this wasn’t the same and encouraged me to keep the contents of the book private. 

He helped me come up with a story about my past, it involved an orphanage in Anchorage. He told me the chances of me meeting someone in Los Angles who was also an orphan from Anchorage was pretty slim. So that was my story. An orphanage in Anchorage run by very kind nuns. Joel and I both felt that the mean nun thing had been overdone. Why not mix it up and make them nice for once. I guess him encouraging me to lie should have tipped me off that something about him wasn’t on the up and up.

But it worked. People usually didn’t ask much more about the orphanage because usually they just wanted to know about Anchorage – how cold did it get, did I eat whale blubber, and had I ever seen a polar bear. I did a lot of research on Anchorage and I’ve been thinking about spending some of my 20 grand to go there. But everything is so wide open right now, I might go to Cancun instead. 

I saw this movie once, Lars and the Real Girl. In it, a guy falls in love with a life-sized plastic doll and everyone in the movie – from the therapist to his family to his church – pretend like it’s real. Everyone agrees to indulge him in his fantasy until he’s ready to give it up. It’s the therapist’s idea and along the way, everyone else starts to believe that the doll – or at least his love for her - is real. It’s a good movie, actually, even though it sounds dumb. One review said “It has a kind of purity to it.” About a movie about a sex doll. Can you believe that? 

But the film makes people seem a lot nicer than they really are. In the world I know, people would make fun of you for walking around with a life-sized doll in a wheel chair. It was nice to escape to a better world than that for a couple of hours. A world where people want the best for you. I guess that world is pretty pure, but it’s definitely not real. Most people are assholes, plain and simple. And they won’t spare an opportunity to ridicule a guy for being weird and try to make him feel like shit about it. 

I thought when we started that maybe Joel was being like the therapist in that movie; indulging me until I was ready to give up the book. And maybe watching that movie was how he learned how to pretend to be a therapist. But nobody called my story pure. Or at least not the version of it that Joel stole from me. And people weren’t kind to me when I was living it. Women didn’t fall for me or find my quirks endearing. Men didn’t befriend me in order to help me figure out how to be in this world. There was no community willing to suspend disbelief and mockery just to help me heal or grow, or whatever shit is supposed to happen when people are unexpectedly kind to you. There was no wise father-like bartender covering for me, calling me Hollywood with a gentle smile and giving me a drink on the house to help make things easier. And Joel definitely didn’t have my best interests in mind. If he did, he would have made a better movie. 

It’s a funny thing to be a blank. No past, no future. There’s this moment and that’s it. Don’t people spend big money on gurus to help them reach that state? Find peace in the stillness? In reality, it’s not at all like Siddartha finding enlightenment in the emptiness. It’s true that there’s no noise, but silence stretching for eternity isn’t exactly comforting. And it doesn’t make my brain any more still. In the movie version that a different film maker than Joel would have made, it would have been a kind of liberation. But that wouldn’t have been any more true than Joel’s version. 

The truth is, the only honest version would have been no version at all. No hero, no anti-hero, no love interest, no protagonist, no antagonist. So I guess calling the story boring is maybe true, maybe Joel got that right. But what he missed was how fucking hard it can be sometimes to be in a human body, to be in a human mind, to have all of your faculties and limbs working and still be paralyzed. What he missed was the tragedy of it all. He captured the blankness of it all, just not how that blankness feels. And for that, I got $20,000 in my pocket and an eternity of nothingness in front of me.