Fridge

The picture above is of my refrigerator. Seems like lot of grub for a cat who lives alone, and as I look at it I wonder what the hell’s going on there? Am I a glutton? A madman? Am I trying to make up for a lifetime of inner homelessness with Japanese broccoli?

Eight years ago I was a fugitive. I would wake, shower and sneak out the back door, fleeing to a Korean coffee shop where I sat in the same seat every day, procuring my daily structure for the price of a Guatemalan pour over. The baristas became my surrogate family. I’d make words and people watch, losing myself in the tea and milk smoothness of Korean women’s hands, but nothing could settle me. I was in full fight even in the chair. At lunch I would run to one of my regular spots for a scallion pancake or yellowtail roll, then back to the coffee shop, before heading to the Y to swim. After that it was off to Peter who ran a boarding house filled with interesting internationals. I’d spend my late afternoons and evenings there, sucking up bits of community and staying one step ahead of whatever was chasing me. Finally (in the cover of night), I would return to my apartment for a few hours of unavoidable solitude. Then wake up and do it all again.

“Keep moving. Don’t stop. Go motherfucker, go!” That was my mantra and always had been. At twelve, I was sent to boarding school in the frozen north. At fifteen, I moved out of my parents’ home never to return. At nineteen I ran the streets of New York, searching for love and trouble, and on my 21st birthday left the city I adored for Los Angeles. I found success as an actor and quit after five years. I got married young and was divorced within two. I went back to poetry, then traded that for screen-writing, swapped that briefly for music, then back to scripts. In the middle of it all I wed again and would leave and return to the marriage compulsively until finally exiting for good. Unable to be with myself, I was unable to be anywhere. The only things I could stick with were my addictions. Burned out of a funky one bedroom in 2016, I moved to a slightly nicer one, half a mile east. There was never food in either apartment’s refrigerator and I ate my meals anywhere but there. “Keep moving. Don’t stop. Go motherfucker, go!

There’s so much good shit in my fridge right now, it’s stupid; all of it from the best growers and purveyors around. I got three kinds of cabbage, these beautiful collard greens, glorious lamb chops and two types of sausage. I have gorgeous, speckled gem lettuce, leeks as long as clarinets and fennel that even Sicilians would swoon for. I got Mason jars of home-brewed ginger tea and a big, glass Tupperware full of these delicious black beans I make-- all kinds of cheese and chard and stuff that’s good to chew. If someone looked at that picture, they’d probably think to themselves, “Man, this dude likes to cook and eat,” but when I look at it, I see something else. I see a cat who’s done running. A man who’s found a home. “Go motherfucker, go” has been replaced with, “Stay. Breathe. You have made a life here.” Yes, I often feel isolated. Yeah, I miss the throb and clang of the coffee shop. Sure, I still get lonely, but it’s a different kind of lonely. A loneliness made of stillness, not of flight.

I thought I went to the farmer’s market every Sunday because I had to have the freshest and the best. Because once you know what’s good, what’s not good just don’t cut it. But seeing that picture I realize I go to be accountable. To make it clear to myself that I am going nowhere. That after almost sixty years of flying by the seat of my pants, I have finally landed. I’m eight years the baby and my whole life I’ve always felt like a kid, but when I open that fridge, I’m Papa!