I digress. And it will be a mess. What a week this has been. First, and least importantly, that phucking DATE NIGHT movie had to open number one (albeit contested) at the box office. I curse because, if you’ll forgive my whining, I wrote a screenplay called DATE NIGHT about five years ago, during my last stretch of screenwriting toils. A great concept, we all agreed, but my agents wouldn’t send it out without a radical rewrite that I never undertook – mostly because I hated their ideas, felt like they just didn’t get my comic sensibility, and also because my confidence as a writer had withered to nothing, and I thought I’d just be wasting everyone’s time, that the rewrite would only disappoint them more. I’d rewritten so many things, so many times, happily and not so, paid and unpaid, but I didn’t think this one needed that much, it just wasn’t that far off. That’s the script, I told them, that’s the concept, that’s the basic story. Take it for what it is. They said no, and that was that. I didn’t even want to look for another agent. I was sick of it.

Though I make no claims to its superiority over the current release (I merely vent at my ten-percenters), in my version of DATE NIGHT, the married couple ends up at the hotel where they spent their wedding night, only to discover that an “alternative lifestyles” (i.e. swingers) convention is being held there at the same time. In a climatic scene, a fire alarm goes off, which sends every guest in the hotel heading for the stairwells to escape. Of course, being swingers, the fleeing herd is entirely naked. Our couple, however, are fully dressed and utterly horrified by the strange flesh surrounding them, engulfing them. Now THAT is funny. Perhaps you think I’m mistaken. So be it. I think not. But my agents, very good and well respected in Hollywood for their boutique agency of writers and directors, hated everything to do with my extended swinger section. I could not believe my ears. You hate WHAT? The goddamn funniest part? WHAT???

Come on, guys, I begged them, to no avail. I practically acted out another scene from the hotel, when the couple runs into an old friend of the wife’s. This old friend turns out to be attending the lifestyles convention, promoting his myriad of fetish websites. When he takes them up to the suite his company has rented, to surprise them with their live webcasts in action, our husband trips and stumbles and tumbles onto the top of a heap of writhing bodies. He flees in grossed-out horror, screaming, “I fell on the orgy pile! I fell on the orgy pile!”

No no, that’s not funny. Sigh.

Ahead of my time. I’ll cling to that. Delusional or not.

Whatever. These agents are too much. I once sat in a meeting with them where they got into an absurdly hostile quarrel about the temperature of the office. Not just a quarrel, but what seemed like a heated lover’s spat, complete with hurt feelings and telling body language. Great, I thought, you two also carry on a secret affair. Perfect. This was in a meeting about my baseball movie that we couldn’t sell, Tom Hanks and Harrison Ford had said no, and it required an established older lead actor, so our choices were limited, and my suggestion of Kurt Russell was met with rolling eyes and chuckles – not nearly a big enough star, I was told, a comparative nobody (silly me, I’d been attracted by the fact he’d actually played minor league baseball). Whatever. So limited were our lead actor choices that the selling of the script essentially ended during that meeting. The meeting that couldn’t start for twenty minutes because they had to argue like high school debutantes, or an old married couple, about whether it was too cold in the office or not. (Their office, mind you, was in a prominent building in Beverly Hills, where the underground parking garage was decorated, literally, with hundreds of thousands of dollars (at least) of fine art prints and posters. The parking garage! Where, as well, the most prominent private parking spaces were reserved for two red Ferraris with, I do not exaggerate, glass hoods. One time, while waiting for the elevator, I noticed two other young writer-types, no doubt in the building for their own pitch meeting, oogling the Ferraris like they wanted to have sex with the automobiles. “You know what I think when I see cars like that?” I asked them. “I think ‘Is your dick really THAT small?’” These two idiots looked back at me blankly, as if they could not comprehend my alien babble. Glass hoods, only in L.A. Better than glass trousers, I suppose. But magnifying pants is what that fool would’ve needed, it must have been microscopic.)

But that was a baseball movie (TAKING THE HILL, a title I still like), always a longshot, no matter how original and solid the concept. DATE NIGHT was different, you could’ve sold that on concept alone. Lousy scripts, and mine wasn't, sold all the time on concepts alone. I’d read several of them. The original CABLE GUY script is one of the more (in)famous examples. A million bucks for a piece of sh-t with a concept. It was rewritten almost from page one, and somehow Judd Apatow got screwed on co-writing credit, in one of the more baffling Writer’s Guild arbitration rulings. My first experience with this kind of script came early in my Hollywood minute (I like to think I still have fourteen left). On the heels of my domestic thriller having made it around town – while not selling immediately, it had garnered me a good number of fans of “the writing” – Producer Scott Rudin, a true heavyweight in the business, wanted to meet with me about rewriting a script he’d bought. When my agents sent me the script, I was so intimidated that I couldn’t even pick it up for three days. Paramount had paid two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars for this screenplay, I’d heard, so it must’ve been infinitely better than anything I could’ve written, there was no way I could make it better. Ah, inferiority! But I finally did read it and, wow, it was truly horrible. The dialogue was so bad it verged on inhuman, as if the author had never had a real relationship of any type – not romantic, parental, friendly, comatose, anything. But the concept was there, if plotted exquisitely poorly (good people do bad thing for right reason, but cover it up and thus make it worse), just as the concept was for the other scripts like it that I’d read: aliens return to earth, restaking a claim to their original home planet; a corruption-fighting detective and his wife are framed for murder; a nitwit wins hundreds of millions in the lottery and runs for president). Unfortunately, the script Scott Rudin had bought, in my opinion, was unfixable. The concept, while evident, didn’t really work, and in changing it you’d really be writing an entirely new script, not rewriting that awful one. Needless to say, I didn’t get the rewrite job, and the movie never saw the light of day – though I would’ve gladly suffered the same fate for that quarter-million. I should’ve just lied and said I could fix it.

                     *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

To pummel a deceased equine a final time, in my take on DATE NIGHT, unlike with Steve Carrell and Tina Fey (apparently, since I can’t yet bring myself to see the movie or read the script), my married couple had younger children, an almost five year-old boy still struggling with potty training, and a baby daughter. Our wife was a schoolteacher, while hubby was mostly homebound, having picked a terrible time to quit his job and get into real estate. In one early scene, after taking a shower, and still in his robe, our husband falls asleep while feeding the baby a bottle. During his nap, however, baby’s mouth slips off the bottle nipple and onto dad’s real nipple. When his wife returns home from a day in the teaching trenches, she finds her sleeping husband breast-feeding involuntarily. Again, there’s no laughs in that, not a chance. Nor is it funny that, after seeing a documentary about toilets on the Discovery Channel, specifically a segment on the military, the little boy informs his father that he will poop on the toilet if dad builds him a latrine. While adamantly resisting early on, by the end, at the conclusion of a crazy date night, dad finds himself in the back yard digging the hole. And our boy finally poops on the literal can. But that’s not funny at all, right? A potty-training-averse kid who requires a latrine in the back yard? That’s not comedy. Hell no.

Sigh. End bellyaching.

Back in the real world, my second stepfather, Jack, died over the weekend. Stepfathers one, two, and three (not in that order) have passed away in the last three years (or taken their own lives, in the case of number three). Only my father and my soon-to-be fourth stepfather survive. If that’s the right word. Remain? Persist? Endure?

Even though his marriage to my mother had ended badly almost twenty years ago – and even though I’d hated when he always referred to me as his “son,” or made a point of telling me that my father had “abandoned” my mother and I, and that he was my father now – I had for many years harbored decent feelings for Jack. He had rescued us, in a way, and protected us from my abusive first stepfather, even if I didn’t want anything to do with him as a child. But then, a few years ago, my sister (his stepdaughter) told me that she had never trusted him, that he had been inappropriate with her beginning when she was a young teen. Not molested her, but inappropriate in a way a man should never be with his stepdaughter. Comments about her breasts growing, “playful” slaps on the butt, things that immediately erased whatever remaining gratitude and affection I possessed toward him. I felt like punching him at the time. But he was an old man at that point. Then again, twenty-one years older than my mother, he always had been.

I don’t know what to think or feel now. Much like I didn’t when my first stepfather had died and, for my brother and sister’s sake, I’d forced myself to muster emotion, managed to pretend to care. Although pretend and care are awful words together. I can only repeat: I just don’t know what to think or feel. I never do, and never have. I think my third stepfather is alive sometimes; it feels like he should still be around. He was a great guy in so many ways, younger than my mother’s other men. But he’d seen his own mother murdered when he was a kid, and I know that too big a part of him, the healthy part emotionally, died that day with her. When he took his own life, his funeral was the single saddest gathering I can remember attending. Now my mother is getting married again. And I want her to be happy. I want the marriage to last forever. I like this guy, but I just don’t know. I have an attachment disorder. And I’ve had it for decades. Clearly. So it goes. And goes again.

T has an attachment disorder, as well. Or has had one in the past. Quite a thing to have in common with her. T is the seven year-old girl we’re in the process of adopting from the foster care system. We met her for the first time last Friday. Nine foster placements in her short life. So neglected, so unloved for so long. She’d received our “family book” earlier in the week, which we put together so she could see pictures of the various members of our extended family. Photos of my wife and I, of course, and our son, who will be ten next month, and the three of us together. Grandparents also, aunts and uncles, cousins, everyone that matters. A dream book for a foster child. This is your new family, your forever family. Here they are, in this book, take it and look. How bizarre, how overwhelming. A little African-American girl, looking at photos of our three white faces. But then she would see my brother and sister, both biracial, and my mother’s fiancé, Musheer, an African-American man. So perhaps she’d be encouraged even more, I hoped, that she wouldn’t stand out as much, but what would that matter? She was a little girl without a family, desperate for lasting love and, yes, attachment, and there we were for her, in photographs on the pretty pink pages of the album my wife and son had put together.

What must she have thought that first night she received the book? Or the rest of the nights leading up to Friday? Trying to sleep when she knew she was meeting us for the first time the next day. How would she get through the school day? Or her hours at the afterschool program? Sometimes she acted out. Would this be too much for her? Would she snap under the pressure? What must her heart and mind have been filled with? Excitement, fear, anxiety, hope, so much to fill such a small body. Too much, no child should have to endure it. But she must. She has not seen either of her parents in years. Mom is into crystal-meth, who knows where she’s sunken. Dad is back in another country, having done prison time here. She has two older siblings and two younger. None have the same father. Mom was arrested for the first time at sixteen, for prostitution. And it didn’t seem to get any better from there. Drugs, violence. Lots of violence. And who knows what else. Children keep secrets, for years, lifetimes, but you never know when they might reveal them. Terrible secrets. Will we hear them? Will our son? Can she hold them in? We are all a mystery to each other.

And then we actually met her. Face to face. The real little person. She kind of hid behind the sofa for a moment at first, in her jeans and bright pink leotard top, in the living room of her foster mother’s house. A beautiful new townhouse in a spotless new tract. Her foster mother drives a new BMW. You’ll have to slum it a little to live with us, I thought, laughing in my head. So strange to meet a new family member this way, with social workers watching, and her foster mother, and the girl, this aching little girl. She came out of her shell quickly, acted as if she had to keep our attention, perform for us, audition, or at least her tortured brain believed she must, lest we’d lose interest in her and leave. So much for a child to feel and act on, so much to process and grasp at, how impossible it must be for her, and you can hear it in her slight speech impairment, a hurried sort of half-stutter, the product of anxiety, of a mind spinning faster than her lips can move. But sweet, so sweet, just a baby in so many ways. Never held as she should have been, never nurtured, never loved.

First we played a game together, a new board game that we’d brought for her as a gift, the Princess and the Pea. T did well; she managed to collect the most mattresses by the end and won the game (though, I must admit, I’d shuffled some pieces late, when no one was looking, allowing her to prevail). After the game, she showed us her room upstairs. It was very nice, if sparse. Bright and new and spotless. She even had her own balcony, and a private restroom with a huge tub. (You WILL be slumming it at our house, sweetie. LOL, I think again.)

“Can we go see my sister?” she asks me.

I know the sister she is talking about. Her older sister, who is 13, who lives an hour north. The sister who projects onto T, onto this innocent little girl, all of her anger about their mother and their painful life together. I shouldn’t comment more on it, except to say that I knew when T asked us about it, that seeing her sister wasn’t going to happen for some time, if at all, and that even if it did we couldn’t promise her it would even be a good visit. We hold this knowledge, T does not. What will it mean? When will she seek it out again, in more detail? The two girls “bonded” in so much trauma. Will our love be enough? Will we have enough of it?

And this is all in the first half-hour of meeting her.

The next day, Saturday, we spent a few hours alone with her. We took her out to lunch for pizza, then went to the park back at her new tract of houses. The tract is so new, so nice and clean, the parks so pristine, that it seemed like the entire time was occurring in a dreamscape. It was unreal. We were the only people in the park. She had us to all to herself, showed us her gymnastics moves, performed and auditioned, wanted us to hold her hands, asked us if she could call us mommy and daddy. And what do you say to that?

Monday we brought her over to the house for the first time, to have dinner and meet our son, her future big brother. The closer that day got, the more real it became for Eli, and his imagined joy at having a sibling became more difficult to figure and navigate emotionally for him. But he did so well, he was so sweet and patient with her. Their first moment was priceless, those innocent eyes meeting.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

They played together well, she didn’t overwhelm him, and I was so proud of my son I could weep. But it was the first meeting. It was a performance, like the ones T thinks she must put on in order to get noticed, in order to keep that attention on her, that attention that has been so absent for so long. That first meeting of the children wasn’t fully real, and when she came over for the second dinner on Wednesday, Eli had started to realize the permanence of it. It wasn’t just a single visit, this would continue, she would eventually be with us forever, a full member of the family. And what must he think? Like her, what does the child make of it all? The healthy child, the loved child, the nurtured child like Eli. Is this fair to do to him? Is forever changing this sweet boy’s life in this way going to be worth it? Will it impact him more positively than negatively? There are no guarantees in life, damaged children are not an easy proposition, and sometimes love might not be enough. Sometimes it is not enough with adults. We do not know. But we believe, we have faith. Not religious faith, but faith in our own human bonds, the ones that get us through life day to day.

T’s foster home has been stable and good for nine months, the private therapy program she’s a part of is intensively individual, and that attention really seems to have worked with T. But, and this is a huge but, we’ve just found out that the county has already been less than up front with us about the extent of T’s emotional problems. Only AFTER meeting the girl, after three visits in fact, did we find out that the private therapy program she is in is for the most severe cases, and that she is the youngest child in the program. “If she continued down the same road,” the program’s young and sharp manager told us, “she was headed for residential treatment, I have no doubt.” The most severe cases? Residential treatment? NOW we learn this? Had we been informed of that in “the telling”, we most likely, out of concern for our son, would never have progressed to “the showing.” Such terms they use. The telling, the showing. So impersonal. But it’s true, if we’d known she was in a program for the most severe behavior cases, our natural instinct to protect Eli would’ve been triggered. My wife and I both know this is true. Now, however, it seems too late to learn this. We know the girl now, she knows us, and to her we are her new family, the mommy and daddy that she calls us. We talk to her every night we don’t see her. How do you return a child? How do we change our minds about her now? I know the horror stories, how some children can act out so much and so severely that they cannot be in homes with other children, that they are indeed removed, but this is T, just a little girl, I’ve held her hand, and I have a good hunch (though it is only a hunch) that it will work out, that she will, that we all will, so how could I take her back now, before we ever really take her in? How do you not only disappoint a child, but most likely destroy a significant part them, as well? Her hope and spirit, what is left of them. How do you destroy a child knowingly?

How can I? When I had been a damaged child once, a child who’d witnessed violence, been the victim of it, who’d become so afraid of his first stepfather, so afraid for his little brother, that he’d planned to kill the man. What would my life had been like if I’d mustered the “courage” to carry out my desperate plan? If I’d hit him with that bat? Or stabbed him with the knife I kept in my bed? Or fed him the medication I’d poisoned? Who would have taken me after that?

At this moment, in her mind and heart, we are T’s family. It leaves me speechless at times. How could it not? Yet we take her home after a few hours each visit. It’s still just field trips, or feels that way. The transition will last about two months; she probably won’t spend the night here for another month, later in May. What will happen if she acts out here, if she does something to Eli, if it goes wrong as life always does sometimes? Will we be able to handle it, to heal her, and not damage our own son in the process? We hope, we have faith. And we know this child has few, if any, other options. But again, it’s not fully real yet. It is all becoming. Developing. Observing. I think that is how love like this comes into existence. Being handed a baby is one thing, natural or adopted. But to introduce yourself with a book, then a board game, then call me daddy, in one afternoon…it staggers the mind. Are you ready? Are you ever ready?

But if we aren’t, then who is?

If we, educated and relatively comfortable people like us, won’t love these children and take them in, then who will?

We are in knots over this, my wife and I. Over the new information about T’s past, the true extent of her problems, and how that could potentially impact our son. Eli, strangely, seems not to be in knots at all. While he doesn’t want to feel like he has to entertain her, and he doesn’t want to get on the phone every night (we agreed to twice a week), he says he’s not worried, and he ACTS like he’s not worried. How is he so much stronger than us right now? Ignorance is bliss? Or is it his lack of cynicism? The kind of cynicism that old folks, and neglected children, seem to develop in overabundance. I know he’s just a child, too, that he is clueless to a large degree about what is involved here, but I still think there is more. He is not as infected as we are. Yes, he worries that his best friend, also a girl interestingly, will not be patient enough to be able to play with his new sister, but all he sees and knows about T is she seems to love us already, loves our cute little dog, and that nothing bad has happened so far. Perhaps he knows on a deeper level, that child psychic level, that we’ll all be fine. And though I hope he will be better for it, more beautiful a being than he is now, still, I do not know. And the not knowing will remain difficult to deal with, until we do know. Which could be far down the line, if ever. Perhaps not, perhaps things will be better than we could have ever imagined, but we can only be patient in the meantime. In that patience, however, will we be harming our boy?

We simply cannot know. Any more than we can know the future regarding much of anything else. A “normal” sibling could just as likely drive him crazy, too. We just don’t know.

One thing I do know, that I noticed about T during her second dinner at the house, is that she eats incredibly slowly, she eats a lot of food, and she is always hungry. While I’d like to think it’s merely because she wants the family time at the dinner table to last, that perhaps it will lead to extra time with us before having to return to her foster mother’s home, I have a strong hunch that she must have lived in homes where having enough to eat was never certain. She eats so slowly, she eats so much, and she is always hungry.

There is more to that sentence, I believe, than food.

On we go, step by unknown step. Emotions all over the map.

Quite the week. Forgive the mess. I find myself short of breath. Therefore…back to the diversions of wasted youth, when I was still living with Heidi and Sandra in Ponce’s bungalow on 32nd Street in Normal Heights, when I was working in Kearny Mesa for eight bucks an hour, when my first gray hair was fifteen years away. Roughly.

                     *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“What’s up, Cool Daddy-O?!”

Tommy, the shipping/receiving clerk, gave me the nickname during my first week at M.G. Electric. Long hair plus goatee equaled Cool Daddy-O. And it stuck.

“How much acid did you drop this weekend, Cool Daddy-O?”

“Cool Daddy-O should be playin’ his bongos for us right now.”

“I bet Cool Daddy-O bangs all the hippie chicks he can find in O.B.”

Not quite, but there are hints of truth in every good nickname. No acid, however, or bongo drums, but as for the chicks, Hank says I never talked about Karen at all back then.

“It took me a month or two to figure out you even HAD a girlfriend,” he remarked to me a few weeks ago.

I suppose I kept quiet about it around the warehouse guys because Karen and I ran hot and cold, and I could be a completely embarrassing mess about it, which I’d never want those guys to witness. My relationship with Karen, while providing me the love and attachment I had desperately needed for years (honorary foster-child that I am), wasn’t enough to heal every wound I had. Or fill every dysfunctional need. Or satisfy similar wants. And what love is? Biologically speaking, I was in my early twenties and, on a base level, I still wanted to be a dude in some way. And dudes didn’t go steady with quiet elementary school teachers. Karen wasn’t warehouse material.