Frozen turkey’s in the oven since last night. Special Trules recipe. Last employed almost forty years ago, on 23^rd Street and Park Avenue South in New York City, in my clown loft, when my parents were still alive, in the early 1980s. Slow roast. Get the bird to stew overnight in its own juices. Guarantees a moist, delicious feast. Or least it used to, as I said. Let’s see.

Forty years is a lonnnnnng time. The times, they have-a changed. Indeed. Bob Dylan, the sage himself, is almost 80.

I’m 73. I’ve lived in sunny California for 38 years, over half my lifetime. Sure, you can take the man out of New York, but you still can’t take New York out of the man. Just ask my friends. Or…. my not so friends.

I’m a father now. Been a husband for 19 years. Never thought I’d be either. Life is different than it used to be. Certainly 2020 has been a spectacularly unique and difficult year. A once in a century plague has challenged and threatened the entire world in ways that nobody alive has ever seen or imagined. The virus, its physical and economic wrath, have affected some more unfairly than others, but no one on the planet has been immune to its scourge.

In my own family, the three of us are, most fortunately, still corona-free, but my wife has lost her full-time restaurant serving job, along with her health benefits, and we Americans, have seen our so-called “most advanced society on earth” become “the most vulnerable nation on earth”, victim to mismanagement, complacency, and an almost-supernatural, internal division. Our employment-based health care system has failed us, our environmental ineptitude has led us to the brink of atmospheric catastrophe, our massive unemployment numbers have driven us to the edge of insolvency, and our Congress’ inability to compromise and solve these dilemmas have led to incalculable human suffering and the demise of our international reputation, with no way to see ourselves out of an angry, domestic deadlock.

But even before this endless year of medical, political, and economic calamity, 2020, I realized that my personal life had changed, inevitably, and probably, unalterably.

I had moved to LA from New Yawk, following a path of New York to LA “emigration” by many of my NY friends, and by happenstance and good luck, I had “inherited” my cousin’s rent-controlled, one-bedroom apartment for $279/month in November 1982. Less than four years later, after ineffectively punching away at the Hollywood acting and directing business, through no doing of my own, I was offered a job at USC in 1986, to join its School of Theater faculty. My one improv class quickly grew to two, then five, during which I was offered a solo performance class, then two of those, and I was soon the only “adjunct” faculty member with benefits. I was a lucky man.

I started traveling extensively in the late 1980s, bringing my own solo performance work to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival a couple of times, where it was surprisingly “short-listed” for best show of the Fringe. I premiered my documentary film, “The Poet and Con” in Nyon, Switzerland, at the International Documentary Film Festival. I got a couple of Fulbright awards to teach in Malaysia and Romania, and in 2000, I met my Indonesian wife-to-be, Surya, on the magical island of Bali. We married in 2003 and in 2015 we brought our 8-year-old nephew, Exsel, also from Sumatra, Indonesia, to Los Angeles, where we legally adopted him in 2016. Along the way, I moved to Echo Park in 1993, where I’m still a renter 27 years later. I still claimed… to be a lucky man. An artist, supported by a good job in academia.

I’ve always thought of my LA life as supported by three pillars. My job. Begun in 1986. My home. Here since 1993. And my marriage. Since 2003. All underpinned by my health. As I’ve also always said, “Health first. You can’t have anything without your health.” I learned this the hard way. I had cancer in 1989. Hodgkin’s Disease. Cancer of the lymphatic system. I was 42 years old when diagnosed. I had 6 months of chemotherapy. Lost my hair and forty pounds. Along with my invincibility. But I survived. I’ve never taken anything for granted again since. Too often though, I forget. Although I shouldn’t. I’ve seen too many friends, and many others, end up… not so lucky. Not survive. As I said…

“Health first. You don’t have anything without your health”.

I remember once… standing in the dining room of my home here in Echo Park… my home that I often call “Lucretia Gardens” because it’s so beautifully appointed… sitting as it does atop a hillside in Elysian Heights… above Echo Park… just about as high in the hills as the Griffith Observatory… with a splendid 270 degree view of all of LA… from the Pacific Ocean to the Hollywood Sign to the San Gabriel Mountains. I was standing there, atop of my three pillars, perhaps in the early 2000s, married, not yet a father, high as a kite, in the hills, perhaps on some medical chocolate cannabis, feeling so hiiiigh, so riiiiight with the world, that I absolutely… wanted nothing more in, or from, life. I felt fully realized… fully satisfied… like there was absolutely nothing more to live for. Like I could just… die… right there… in that moment… and I wouldn’t miss… a damn thing. In fact, I felt my knees collapse. I fell to the carpeted floor…. and… and… then… in that same blissfully fulfilling moment… I heard… the front door… open. It was… my wife… coming home from a job, or something… and I found myself… still alive. And that suddenly… was that. The fleeting moment… was gone. Forever. And I never felt like that… ever again.

And ever since…. those three pillars have been eroding, along with my health.

In 2011, my wife threw me a “When I’m 64” birthday party. You know, the Paul McCartney- Beatles Sergeant Pepper song “When I’m 64” song – for my 64^th birthday. Many people came out to “Lucretia Gardens” for the day of celebration. Old high school friends from New York. A college friend or two from SUNY Buffalo. One 1970s Chicago modern dance friend. A couple of 1980s New York Cumeezi clown troupe friends. Lots of LA friends who I’d known for 30 years. Judi Davidson brought her husband, Gordon, the famous LA theater producer-impresario, who I’d only dreamed about, after that day he and I would go on to create a class about his life work at USC, for several years before he passed away. It was a big day for me, even though I was a man who often had birthday parties for himself in the past. But even in 2011, I wondered if… “it would be all downhill” after that day “when I was 64…”

As I said, I’m 73 now. I retired from USC in 2017. My working life is over. My job gone. One of the three pillars has clearly disappeared from my life. I taught for 31 years. It was enough. I don’t miss teaching, the classroom, or the students. Although it was a great, flexible, and rewarding job for so many years. I retired because I was sick of my last boss, the dean. He was a bully. He didn’t listen to me or to any of his faculty, and I was sick and tired of listening to him. But as always, like the good improv teacher I was… like the well-practiced improvisor of life I’ve always been… I only lived for the moment. I only lived in the moment. I didn’t see the big picture. I never saw the big picture. Because… I’ve never been a good planner. I always found that “life happened while you were waiting for your plans to work out”. So I never made plans for the future and when I did, they almost never worked out. As a result, “security” never meant much to me.

I could have kept my job and outlasted my dean. University deans come and go. Full time faculty stay forever. As it turned out, my “boss” lost his job a year before my retirement. But now, three years after my retirement, I’m sleeping in the bed I’ve made for myself, one pillar less strong. And…as it turns out… the second pillar… was perhaps… only an illusion. The “home” was not “mine”. It was someone else’s. My landlady’s. She bought it for $39,000 some time in the 1970s, and it’s now worth well over 1 million dollars. Far more than I could ever afford. When I moved here in 1993, it was worth about $225,000. I offered to buy the house two times. Around 1996 for $250,000 and around 2008, the second time, when I had the USC job at a good full-time salary, for about $550,000. The landlady said no both times.

She used to be a nice landlady. A nice Pakastani woman, she raised a family here in Echo Park in the 1970s, and she used to bring over Christmas cookies every holiday season to me and my then-time roommate, because she was so pleased that we were such reliable tenants. But then she re-married an international real estate attorney, who owned properties himself in Mumbai, who believed that tenants were 2^nd or 3^rd class citizens, who were never to be heard from, only to be demanded from and told what to do. My “nice” landlady gradually transformed into a hostile, untrusting owner, who told me to “pay up or move out because I’m (she was) part of the 1% and you’re (I was) only part of the 99%.” True dat!

It turns out that every one of my LA friends of about my age, except yours Trulesly, and even many of my former students, own a house here in Los Angeles. It’s the LA thing to do. Not the New York thing to do. And I already told you about the New York thing and a man. I mean, even my well-to-do New York friends still rent in New York. It’s no big deal. That’s what you do in Manhattan. You rent. No upkeep. No surprises. No ownership. But here? In LA? In America? You buy! It’s the American dream. It’s the immigrant dream. It’s the path to wealth and equity. But did I know that? No. Did they teach me that in school? No. Did my parents do it? Yes. My sister? Yes. All my LA friends? Yes. Why not me? Because…. I was a non-conformist. An anti-materialist. A member of the 1960s “counter culture”. I didn’t believe in money, property, wealth, or ownership. Sure, I owned 401(k) stocks and saved enough to retire on. But buy a house? No, I didn’t. Was I complete and utter, house-denying fool? In retrospect, sadly… yes. Is it a bone of constant contention between me and my immigrant, house-dreaming wife? Absolutely… yes. Is there a solution in the post-corona unknown future? I sincerely… hope so.

But there you go… two pillars down.

Now let’s talk some health….

Cancer in 1989. Full recovery. Except at the price of infertility (more of that later). But lucky, right? I beat cancer at 42. I’m still kicking 30 years later. Hip replacement in 2008. Spinal decompression surgery just last year in 2019. My knees and shins have hurt every day since. I’m learning to live with it.

I’m not 20 years old anymore, when I was a modern dancer, took dance class, rehearsed, and taught – seven hours a day, then fell asleep like a baby five days a week. And then performed on weekends. I’m not 30 years old anymore, when I was a professional clown, clowned in public, rehearsed, and taught for 6 hours a day – then fell asleep like a baby 5 nights a week. And then performed on weekends. I’m not 40 or 50 years old when I taught 4 classes a day at USC for 8 hours in a row without a lunch break and fell asleep like a baby every school night. And sometimes performed on weekends. And I’m not 60 years old when I was “semi-retired” and only taught one semester out of two, and hardly performed at all anymore.

Since my spine surgery, I’ve seen every doctor that Kaiser has thrown at me, but not one of them has been able to either diagnose or treat me successfully. They don’t even agree with each other. “Thoracic spinal stenosis”, “spondylosis”, “patella tendonitis”, “shin splints”, “neuropathy”, “radiculopathy”… the last one I like the sound of best… “radiculopathy””…. some kind of pain coming from the spine, or the nerve root, who knows which? Does it really matter? Maybe not. Because “no one really knows”. That’s what my neurosurgeon, the immaculately coifed, world-renowned, Dr. Chang, tells me.

“Can’t really say, Mr. Trules.”

A little like William Goldman, the notorious Hollywood screenwriter, who famously said, “Nobody knows anything.” Well, that’s it for my 70-year-old body. “Radiculopathy”. My spine. My nerves. My shins. My knees.

“Nobody knows anything.”

Ridiculous.

“Just live with it, Mr. Trules.”

And so I do.

Which leaves just one more pillar. My marriage. Which, to tell the truth, has always been the shakiest of the three. Why wouldn’t it be? My wife is thirty-one years younger than I am. She came here to LA without speaking English. Without having any cultural references, such knowing who Bob Dylan, John Lennon, or Richard Nixon were. You might say, she comes from a different world than I do. With so much less experience than her older, supposedly wiser, husband.

But was that really the case? I took her under my wing, taught her everything I could, but then she grew up and came to resent much of everything me and my left-leaning, atheistic friends believed. Especially how we criticized our own country and weren’t grateful for the privileges, opportunities, freedoms, and benefits we received and took so much for granted from our government, which were a far cry less than those she never received in Indonesia, and which she believes, most of the human population in the third world, will never receive a fraction thereof. She deeply believes that we should all just shut up and show a little more gratitude and appreciation. Sometimes, I have to painfully admit, I think she’s right.

As I’ve aged and she’s grown up, I’ve seen our relationship as a natural evolution, as a “changing of the guard”. A sort of “passing of the driver’s wheel”, where at first, I did all the driving, educating, and decision-making, and then as she got older, more educated, and got to know who she was and what she wanted, she did more of the driving as I sat more and more frequently in the passenger seat…. eventually, no doubt, heading more and more frequently and surely and inevitably, towards old age and… the back seat.

But then the marriage changed… miraculously… when Surya proposed… and I accepted… bringing Exsel… our nephew… her older brother’s middle son… then 8 years old… from 3^rd world Sumatra… to very 1st world LA. To give him a chance, an opportunity… to change his life…. to be able to give back to his natal family after being educated here, in America. It was first, just an idea, a trial, and I agreed to it.

As I said, chemotherapy had cured my cancer but made me infertile. We had tried IVF, unsuccessfully, so adoption was perfect for us, particularly adoption of this special boy, our nephew. I had met Exsel in Bali… at our villa in Padangbai, when we brought him there… for just a few days. He had jumped in the pool… hundreds of times… with floaties on his arms… as if his joy and enthusiasm were boundless… and endless. He was such a happy, curious, enthusiastic kid. So… I took a chance. And… neither of us have… ever looked back.

I’ve become a father! And my life has changed. Inevitably. Unalterably. “Marriage” has become “fatherhood”, and the three pillars have seemingly become one. I live for the boy. I wake up at 6:15 to read the newspaper (the one concession I still keep for myself), then I start with my own “Trules-designed”, pre-school homework with Exsel, starting at 7 a.m. – dictation, spelling, reading (out loud), – before I make him breakfast and drive him to school every by 8 a.m.

Yes, I’m retired from USC, but I have a new full-time job… Daddy Trules. I have no complaints. I’ve shepherded all his immigration papers through USCIS and the Department of Homeland Security, just like I did for my wife. (It took us 8 years to get her a green card and U.S citizenship!) For Exsel, I figured out health insurance, Medi-Cal, learning English, playdates, soccer mom-ing, pepperoni pizza, chicken nuggets, skateboards, and all the rest. All starting at 68 years old.

The boy keeps me young. Makes me laugh. Keeps the clown in me alive. Of course, I have to say that… I think I lucked out. That I got a “good one”. Because I just don’t find it that hard. In fact, I find it… fun. Focusing. Joyful. So many of my friends, and of course strangers, ask,

“How can you do it? Start parenting at 70 years old? It’s so hard! I could never even imagine doing it.”

But like I said, it’s not like that for me. I think I missed the hard part. The infancy. The diapers and the crying all night. I got the sweet, innocent, beautiful boy, eight to twelve years old. And even now that he’s an early adolescent, a pimply thirteen-year-old whose voice has dropped a register and whose hair is sprouting in all the right places, I still find him sweet, affectionate, and easy to be with. He’s my best friend. All my adult friends love him. Yes, all my fingers and toes are crossed that this will last as long as humanly possible, but for all the challenges life has thrown at me, for all the erosion of my pillars, this boy makes it all… more than worthwhile.

Which simply put… brings me to the point of this long missive, the first of its kind in quite a while. A post with no solicitation at its core. Can you believe it? Trules not asking for a donation for a show, or a podcast, or a documentary film? For the next self-serving, artistic whatever-athon. Something truly must have changed here, don’t you agree?

Because the point here is simply… gratitude. For the life I do have. For the health I do have. For the retirement I’ve created. For the marriage that still amazingly endures. For the wife who is still stubbornly with me. For the boy we have… miraculously adopted….

…who… after 5 1//2 years…. just got his GREEN CARD from USCIS (United States Citizens and Immigration Services), making him a PERMANENT RESIDENT, of the great USof A, the country my wife still so adamantly admires.

———————————–

I hope this Turkey Day past finds you healthy and safe. I hope you have not lost someone dear to the surging virus. I am grateful that a majority of American voters voted Donald Trump out of office. And I am hopeful that a vaccine or two will soon be available to every one of us all around our haunted and inter-connected plant – in the very near future…..

Love to you all. We certainly need it.

 

Trules

 

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