Regretful, nostalgic, curious, melancholy, I recently opened my 15 years of Facebook Messenger to look at old messages, sent and received.
2007-2022.
Who were these people? What did I want with them? What was I hoping for?
I found a vast wasteland of forgotten names, broken connections and lost memories.
On August 9, 2012, I sent Christian L. a photo from a party. On November 3, 2016, he opened it. That was the end of our conversation. Who was Christian? What photo did I send? I’ll never know.
15 years ago, like 15 minutes ago, I was looking for work. Or thinking of sex. Or trying to connect to someone for some reason involving either reason.
Zokai was a muscular black trainer from the gym. He was a potential protagonist in my short story, “Decline Press.” I thought I would photograph him. Have him read dialogue from the story. I sent him a message on August 14, 2016. What became of that? Nothing. Maybe I was to blame for spelling his name as “Zaikai.”
I unearthed a buried trail of dead ends, leads that lead nowhere, communications dreamt up out of my hopes, longings and imagination.
I was always thanking someone.
On June 14, 2012, I thanked Samson whom I talked to at the Raymer Street Bridge. I have no recollection of the man or the conversation, but I do have a good friend with that last name who lives near Raymer Street.
But he is not that Samson.
Then there was Satoshi, the hermetic, buzz cut Japanese model who brought me to a chanting worship service at his Buddhist temple in North Hollywood. I spent two hours gasping for breath as I repeated the same indecipherable chant over and over again.
I tried to contact him after the service, but he never returned my messages. Angered, I sent him one of my petulant texts, and then attempted to apologize. I felt bad for him because his mother died. And then I met a man whose mother also died, me.
I was forever striking out and asking for forgiveness.
I was always trying to fix what I fucked up.
I often attempted to go back in time before I offended, to find my way back to paradise before my fall.
Does everyone have a life like mine? Is it mere honesty or self-flagellation which propels me to air out long forgotten messages that don’t mean anything?
Should I even air my dirty laundry? Aren’t we all saints in our own mind? FB Messenger begs to differ.
Ambitious, directed, soul cycling, tanned and glistening fashion executive Glynis who I worked with at Ralph Lauren in 1989-90. I owed her an apology before she asked for one. That was 2013. I haven’t spoken to her in ten years, but here I was asking for her forgiveness.
I look again at 15 years of long-gone messages that went out to strangers, friends, acquaintances, co-workers,hotties, cousins, aunts, brothers, lovers, ex-friends and permanent enemies. I review notes of infinitesimal pettiness, penitential pleading, glib emotionality.
I see myself in the mirror, cracked, crazy and unhinged. Or kind, forgiving, funny, ridiculous, self-effacing.
My father died in 2009 at age 76. He grew up in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood and his boyhood pals included Norm Jacobs, who took over Baseball Digest in 1969. Jacobs is 89 and a silent partner with Jerry Reinsdorf in the syndicate that owns the Chicago Bulls.
Norm is also a multi-millionaire publisher and owner of a sports team. His pal, my dad, spent his life going from mediocre job to job in publishing and advertising, battling epilepsy, raising a retarded kid. Norm never hired my dad, never looked after his well-being, really never knew a thing about my father’s life after 1950.
After my father died Norm was annoyed was me. I had let his teammates down.
During the pandemic death was all around. Carol had died. She was a girl, then a woman, who moved with her family from Wilmette, IL to Woodcliff Lake, NJ the same year we did. Our families were friends. I lost touch with her. Now she was dead.
I sent a condolence message to her surviving partner Katherine in Chicago who never answered.
Did it matter I cared enough to send a kind note to a grieving person I had never met, 40 years after I last spoke to their dearly departed?
Yet my condolence note on March 19, 2018, to Patrick, concerning the death of our mutual friend Trout, mattered.
I found a long-forgotten request to Councilwoman Nury Martinez to clean up a trash heap. When the distinguished history of Van Nuys in the early 21st Century is written who will memorialize my contributions and my plaintive emails and texts to correct the filth that befouls our district?
Was the trash cleaned up? Did the trash come back? Or did it persist, like my messages, under a smoldering heap?
There are many messages to people that fell out of friendship. Chris was offended when I said his kitchen wall was hollow. Jacque, friend of 40 years, crucified me for not stopping off to say good-bye when I left Chicago after a two-day visit. “You were always selfish!” she said.
And Kristy McNichol. I sent her a FB message when I finished writing my novel about two families in 1980s Pasadena, “Exiles Under the Bridge.” Surely, she would be interested in it, having starred in a late seventies TV show, Family, which was set in that town.
How the imagination works, and tortures, and devises improbabilities, spun out of fantasy, to keep us alive and hopeful.
Sweet Anita. We met through my blog. She lives nearby. We always laughed, she always complimented me, we had dinner at her house, she came to mine for wine and cheese.
I pulled her off FB when we moved to opposite ends of the political fence. Yet I still miss her, wish I could crawl back into her good graces, for surely, we have done nothing to offend one another, and what happens in the voting booth, should stay in the voting booth.
I grew up when it was unspeakable to desire the same sex. Now it is blasphemous to desire a person from the other political party.
On May 30, 2019, I waved to Christina. Who is she? I don’t know.
Keith B. came up to me at Starbucks on August 3, 2017.
Cary apologized for “getting pretty boisterous” at MacLeod Ale on April 6, 2015, and how things may have gotten a bit out of hand, and damn if I don’t remember anything about it.
MacLeod’s beer and my intoxication, was another instigator of trouble when I made a joke at the brewery about Sam W.’s “$250 sweater.” He didn’t take offense.
In 2015, just like 2022, and 1994, I was wondering who an agent for my writing might be. An obscure life prepping for a recognized life that will never be.
Producer, director, writer, political activist, and Married to a Millionaire Melissa of Nyack, NY let me know my short stories had no money in it.
Brad sent me a message on October 9, 2013, asking if I knew where Matt was? (Matt was a hustler/model I photographed a few years earlier.)
I didn’t know where Matt was.
I still don’t know where Matt is.
Here in Van Nuys 
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