I WAS LOST IN DENVER, AT A TRAIN STATION THAT DIDN’T EXIST WHEN I LEFT THE MILE-HIGH CITY EIGHT YEARS BEFORE. The airport terminal, once resembling a shock of Barbarian yurts arising out of the prairie, had metastasized to a ziggurat of Babylonian reckoning; grandiosity in glass. A monument to years of Californication I had apparently missed. Fitting that I was lost now; I had been just as lost when I lived here. I'd flown back to Colorado, to sift through the debris of a starter life which had blown up in my face in 2010. When up against the time-bomb of human expectation, I had cut the red wire instead of the green one; loosing my first business, a household, a dog; indeed, dodging a starter marriage bullet, now that I’ve had a few years to chew the cud. Squirreling the evidence into two storage units and after a detour to Asiatic parts unknown, I holed up in Oregon to lick my wounded pride.

In my last life, I would pick up the AB bus from Island six on the airport terminal’s ground floor, head west, towards the front range—God’s own cairn—where the Great Plains end, and the Continental Divide was imminent. I had spent my undergrad in the shadow of those mountains. In 2001 I met Margot. She had kept my keys safe, and her apartment was just a stone’s throw away from my storage unit; Cosmic kismet. She had a couch I could surf, plus we hadn’t seen each other in years. We had been inseparable throughout those tumultuous college years just as dawn broke on the 21st century. Always friends; briefly lovers; now the closest I’ve ever had to a flesh-and-blood sister, Margot knew me at a time when I didn’t know myself. Always steady; always reliable. The only woman on Earth around whom I’ve been altogether, wholly uninhibited, it was second nature to trust in her stewardship.

A commuter train, a bus, and an Über later, we sat, catching up over Chinese takeout in a Louisville that suspiciously resembled Napa Valley. Margot hadn’t aged a day. She looked like she stepped out of the LP dust-jacket of some ‘70s Krautrock Band; hair between hot toffee and medium champagne; eyes of the sort of clear blue I’ve only seen in Fjords.

“Think I ordered the wrong dish,” she exclaimed between ravenous bites of what was supposed to be chicken, “tastes like sugar, honey… and cake.”

I swiped some of her dish with my own chopsticks. It washed up on my tastebuds all contradiction; a culinary train-wreck; anti-umami. I pushed my meal to the middle of the table and we shared it instead. “I’ve come to expect the unexpected,” I offered with a wink. That was how our friendship had always been, Erzählnächte where everyone opens up and shares the essential; a story; a dish, and the truth. Among a handful of women had ever bothered to serve me the straight dope about myself, Margot would fearlessly poke the wolf, threatening to make me personable. I might have been the older of the two of us, but she was possessed of a mama-bear force of personality so potent, one couldn’t help but want to earn her respect. I needed her to see how much I had grown, that the quixotic twenty-something she once knew, had passed through a solemn masculine rite-of-passge, emerging—seasoned—on the other side.

“Tell me about your life,” Her Patti Smith voice still only slightly sandpapered by cigarettes. “Y’know, I get the bits and pieces, but we haven’t really talked. Not like we used to.” She had me there. I’d let myself fall into my new surroundings; friendships falling just out of focus while I obsessed over the minutiae of rebuilding over the years. It must have seemed strange; my turning up in her world again, a little less green, a little more James Dean.

“My life,” I chuckled, hoping she wouldn’t see me hedging on a few too large bites of white rice and prawns. “I’m sick of wandering the desert. I might’ve finally built something I can rely on.” I hated talking about myself. I always sounded grandiose and it was embarrassing. Other people’s lives seemed far more credible. Justine would tease me about it relentlessly, saying she’d hired a Private Investigator to dig up skeletons. It was all horsing around.

“With your girl, Justine?” Justine. I had hardly been off the plane from Munich forty-two hours before we started corresponding. She was now my girlfriend of nearly 3 years. Definitely the funniest woman I had ever met, She had brought levity into my solemn world, also continuity. I hated coming back to The States from abroad. The instant I set foot on American soil my guts strangulate. The great rat race, from sea to shining sea; everyone must stay in their prescribed lane. The superficiality olympics: Just, under the veneer of American affability lay a simmering spitefulness. The friendly guy bagging your groceries over baseball palaver would, in the apocalyptic collapse, be eating your pets. Europe was home; I could always be myself there. I couldn’t necessarily make a living.

“It’s more than that,” I shook my head, “We’ve a great place in the center of town—1940s trolley house flat—two strange dogs, a cat. I’m within walking distance of a bunch of Ad Agencies,” I scooped more prawns into my imminently complaining mouth while elsewhere in the world some poor bastard was dining on cricket Crudités, “it’s too perfect.”

“Sounds like you don’t trust it.”

“It’s more than that. I’m afraid to get comfortable,” I stopped a beat and considered the gaggle of high school girls sat at the table next to us. I remembered being that age, full of daring and brimming with excitement about the future. Fully possessing a clear vision of my ideal life; committed to attaining it with abandon. I hadn’t reckoned on the apathy miasma of the Pacific Northwest. Both Anne Waldman, and Eleni Sikelianos had warned me about the move, urged me to go to New York instead. At the time, keeping the true distress of my situation so submerged, no one could help me. I had only been to Portland once; the only family I was remotely close to had built a place there; enticing anonymity offered sanctuary, but I was too intoxicated with defeat to let on that was really why I was leaving, “Impostor syndrome: At any moment I could be exposed and,” I snapped my fingers, “it all just evaporates-”

“-like a fart in the wind,” She could often finish my sentences and I loved that despite myself. “Does Justine know all this?”

“Not in so many words. I think she sees me flailing about somewhat lately. Business has slowed down,” I leaned back in my seat, remembering my tendency to stop my diaphragm and pulled in a large breath, “She has the luxury of going into work everyday, seeing the same people, meeting the same delineated expectations. She knows she will have a paycheque every two weeks. Things are spasmodic on my end; feast or famine, and to anyone unaccustomed to dating a business owner, it has to look like I’m sat at home all day with my thumb up my ass.” Being an entrepreneur and being unemployed all too often looked like the same thing.

“She understands. She’s still with you, right?” Margot bathed some fried delight in plum sauce, “I don’t hear you complaining about her. Sounds like she has her act together and knows what she won’t put up with; way more together than your ex-”

“Which one?” I cut in, “There’ve been dozens since I left. I really am a sucker for a good femme fatale.” An homage to ourselves; we’d spent much of our twenties floundering in serial monogamy quagmire with a tacit pact: Spill the beans on our various conquests—under the stars and over a bottle of suds. We’d enjoyed coition long ago. Wrapped up in the cloak-and-dagger—our social circle wasn’t to know about it. The flame couldn’t breathe. Once fuck-er and fuck-ee; cultural dictum held introduction of sex into a friendship must, through primordial calculus, delimit a man and a woman’s interactions; transmute familiarity into discord. Friends could be natural equals. Friends turned lovers could deplane into a frenetic orbit around power. We could either be mates, or ‘mates.’ Backing away from that primal bullshit, returning to the known quantity of our platonic equality, we moved on; took other lovers. She’d recently got serious with her Polish chap. It was good to see her happy, trusting in the possibility.

“Oh, you know the one, what’s her face. I’m blanking on her name.”

“Also Justine.”

Minimalism. That new promethean fire in my guts. Like a certifiable dope, I had been paying the storage bill since 2010. Watching it slowly give ground to inflation penny by miserable penny. Elated, I slipped my keys into the padlocks that had held up against the elements all these years, and popped the seal. I had left in a hurry. Everything I owned and thought I cared about a jumbled heap that had sat there untouched for 2,802 days. More than once over the years I had tightened my belt to pay that bill. There I stood, in the chill morning air, when the absurdity of it all hit me. Boxes warped and settled. The spiders enjoyed a field day. Even DVDs could grow mould. For five days straight I sorted the things I really wanted: Books, Records, a 16mm film camera, photos, my Les Paul Guitar—I cut my Gen-X teeth in an analog world. Everything else I gave away, some of it free to complete strangers, some hauled to thrift stores, destined to be a rad find for some lucky teen hipster. I didn’t care to waste my time trying to turn a buck on any of it. I just wanted the chaff gone, packing away my few treasures for a driver to pick up in a week’s time. Margot and her boyfriend had first dibs. He’d just signed a lease on a new place and needed the essentials. Their friend Dickie got my old Monopoly board game for his kids, their smiles worth every millisecond of sweat equity. A woman I had never met broke down in tears when I told her the garden bench and boxes of art supplies were hers free. She just wanted to sit in her garden and finally learn, with arthritic hands, how to paint. In helping others, I was letting go; releasing the trappings of a middle-class stature I had spent years battling to attain; the sturm und drang my ex and I created while assembling a dragon’s hoard of bourgeois excess seemed absurd. I was unattached to any of what I had slaved away to afford.

Each night, as the sun set behind the mountains, I shambled back to Margot’s place—exhausted and in pain after 15 hours of lifting, schlepping and driving. This was when I noticed something was wrong. I had rented a U-Haul with a raised cab, much higher than I was used to climbing into. There was a dull, throbbing pain in the seat of my pants. Initially, chalking it up to the degree of labour I was engaged in, I shrugged it off. Maybe I just pulled a muscle or bruised myself somehow. I always prided myself on being a tough bastard, accustomed to 15 hour days on film sets with 50 lbs of camera weight on my stedicam; constantly on my feet; contorting myself into all manner of uncompromising positions. Anything to get the shot. 80% of Filmmaking is manual labour. 90% of landing jobs, is being the guy who goes the extra mile when every molecule of you is threatening self-detonation. Scrubbing myself down in Margot’s shower, the pain in my backside growing just that much worse each day. A stinging that was soon routed by a wailing soreness. And I was leaving blood behind me in the toilet.

My mother once told me, when I was a little boy, routinely chucking my raincoats and galoshes in true Punk rebellion on even the wettest day, that I had a keen talent for self-deception. Regarding the contents of the toilet bowl, I made my deductions, negotiating with that part of myself that wouldn’t stand for the vagaries of life. The rationalization machine churned in my head. Must be Hemorrhoids… Ok, maybe an ulcer, I had been under a great deal stress for years. What if it’s something slightly worse? I have some Ashkenazi Jewish roots, that's a risk factor for Crohn’s Disease. Duly noted. If it gets worse, get it checked out. How dare my body get in the way of my objectives.

I didn't have health insurance, a bellwether around my neck. Not because I didn’t think it was important, or out of a misplaced sense of invincibility. Firm relegation to the grand casino of self-employment was de rigueur in my line of work. Employees may have the illusion of security, but they weren’t graced with the freedoms the 1099 Master Race enjoyed. We were the quintessential ronin; gunslingers carving out territory, and to be the apex predator demanded sacrifice. My twenties and early thirties were prime positioning for gambling that my health would simply hold out, that by the time the infirmity of age reared its hydra head, I would be comfortably able to see to it. There was no reason not to grind on. Ad agencies and production companies mushrooming throughout Portland; five of the busiest within a block of my house; plenty of service work from L.A. and Vancouver B.C.; five to eight features a year, and four TV shows filming concurrently. Business was booming, and thought I had established myself well, built enough social-proof and credibility to be a contender.

As Autumn 2016 wound up the character of the market seemed to darken in the spotlight, becoming increasingly insular. Agencies with whom I could reliably book a few shoots per month, left contracts hanging in mid-air; full-time positions currency for nepotism. Any accomplishment felt like a lucky roll of the d20. Enter a metastasizing political malarkey; the industry tripping over itself in a mad scramble for every opportunity to engage in vacuous virtue-signaling. I felt my stakes were higher than most—being the only minority business owner in my local industry market, I was obliged to stay in the game. Yet much of the diversity rhetoric seeped from the same lily-white agencies that had apparently lost my phone number. Base 10 expectations in a Base 5 universe. They professed to believe one thing, while doing the opposite—Elementary Freud; Basic Jung. An industry tap-dancing gleefully into hypocrisy Vaudeville. I made it bloody personal; allowed myself to plummet, from the cornerstone of objective thinking into the delicious deception of subjectivity. Gripping, like grim death, a poisonous personal narrative: 16 years fighting an uphill battle, shot all over the world from Vice to Rolling Stone; day-played Portlandia, and Grimm; even had an Oscar win. None of it could satiate the beast of my own brutal standards. Returned to nobody, bidding on upwards of 5 jobs a week, consistently meeting crickets. A few of my pitches were stolen, massaged and served up with chips to some HR director’s friend’s roommate—with no formal training and a quarter of the overhead; he’d do it for peanuts. Business as usual, but by my troubled reckoning so much more: A leisurely hanging, drawing and quartering of meritocracy. Any sensible person, with less ego-investment, would see the writing on the wall; take his toys and go home. The notion of facing illness while the market turned on its ear, while my brand wallowed in inexplicable disintegration, business collapsed and someone at home was relying on me to stay afloat, didn’t bear considering. I had to untangle this gordian knot. I couldn’t get sick. Not with anything serious. I simply hadn’t the time.

My last day in Colorado. Margot dropped me off at Union Station; the last place I saw when I left all those years before. She insisted on seeing me off, driving me 20 miles to Denver, even though she would have to drive 30 miles in the opposite direction to make work on time. She had gifted me her hospitality, her labour, her devotion. I handed her back my storage keys, “for the driver. He should be here in about a week.”

“I’ll keep them safe,” she said, squeezing me tight. She still smelled of cherries, “It was so good to see you. You look great. You sound great. Let me know when you get in, ‘kay?”

“You bet,” I passed one hand along my head, checking my pomade. It’d become habit when my words ran dry and I wasn’t sure what else to do. I hate long good-byes—I always suffer to restrain my enthusiasm. Watching Margot leave in the old truck so familiar that every time I see one like it, no matter where, I expect her to be behind the wheel singing; puffing away on the sweetest cigarette anyone has ever smoked. I boarded a train that hadn’t been there before; then a plane perhaps I had flown on before. Back to Oregon, an old set of problems and what seemed to be a fresh one to add to the heap. A first step on the great nightmare. A neither wise, nor articulate man once said, “Everyone’s gotta a plan ‘til they’ve been punched in the face.” My driver never made it. My things still sit in that storage to this day. I’m still paying the bill.