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May those who love us love us.
And those that don't love us,
May God turn their hearts.
And if He doesn't turn their hearts,
May he turn their ankles,
So we'll know them by their limping.
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| Home Again |
| 03.22.04 (7:04 am) [edit] |
by Martha Noyes
I was gone nine years. Ambition lured me from Hawai'i to Los Angeles and
it was the pursuit of that ambition that kept me there. I wanted to write great
screenplays and win an Academy Award. It took me a few years before I
understood that making movies is a business, not an art, that the guy with the
money gets to be right. And the potential for profit weighs far more heavily on
Hollywood's scales than story, character or dialogue. I learned to make a
living selling options on my screenplays and ghostwriting true crime stories for
ex-police officers who couldn't write, but had colorful stories to tell.
At the beginning of my ninth year, I finally sold a screenplay. I also
turned forty. A few weeks after my birthday, one of the office towers across
the street from my apartment building caught on fire. My roommate and I watched
from our balcony as dozens of agents, producers, talent managers and their
assistants poured into the street. The assistants carried Rolodexes. Their
bosses talked on cell phones. For a few minutes, while the fire trucks and
squad cars arrived, there was pandemonium. Then, seated on the sidewalk across
the street from their burning offices, the agents, producers, talent managers
and assistants spun through the Rolodexes, dialed phones, and made deals. The
world might be on fire, but Hollywood went right on working.
Later that same week, someone, or some gang, went on a spree, shooting at
cars on the freeway.
One smog-brown late spring morning, I awoke nearly floating in sweat. I
hurried to shower and primp. I had a breakfast meeting with a handsome and
single studio vice president. At 8:25 a.m., I parked in the lot just down the
street from Nate 'n' Al's in Beverly Hills, and one minute before 8:30 a.m., I
was inside the restaurant. Nicholas walked in as the hostess asked, "How many
in your party, Hon?"
As gallant as he was handsome, Nicholas glided to my side and took over.
"Two," he said.
Breakfast was wonderful, although I couldn't taste a thing. He was
wonderful, too. I knew, as one almost always knows these things, that before we
parted company, Nicholas was going to ask me out.
We lingered over coffee until after 10:00 a.m., the hour Hollywood
officially starts its day, and then Nicholas said, with genuine regret, that he
had to go.
We walked out together. His Jaguar was parked in a metered slot in front
of the deli. The red violation flag was up. Nicholas dropped a dime in the
slot and said, "I'll walk you to your car."
We jabbered on about movies past and present, about who was who and who had
been who. Then Nicholas asked what I planned to do over the weekend.
I dug my keys out of my purse and unlocked my four-year-old Toyota Corolla,
and turned to tell him I hadn't made plans yet.
He didn't hear me. He was staring at my car with disgust. He made a blunt
farewell and left me standing at the open door of my sudden fall from grace.
I bought a one-way ticket home.
A week later my plane landed in Honolulu. I moved into the downstairs
storage room of my brother's house. I bought his rusty old Volkswagen pick-up
truck for two hundred dollars. I enrolled in a Hawaiian language class that met
Tuesday evenings at five o'clock at the Lili'uokalani Children's Center on
Vineyard Boulevard.
The first Tuesday came and I set off in my battered truck.
I couldn't find the center. Or rather, I found it only after I'd passed
it. And that part of Vineyard is a one-way street. Every time I passed the
center I had to drive around a very large block - in the middle of rush hour -
again. When I started on my fourth circuit I vowed to nose into every driveway
along Vineyard so I wouldn't go past the center again.
But when I got onto Vineyard, traffic was heavy. I didn't want to drive
slowly because I didn't want to anger the drivers behind me, but I really didn't
want to drive around the block again.
I turned into a narrow alleyway. If it weren't the entrance to
Lili'uokalani Children's Center, it would at least get me off Vineyard for a
moment. But an aged and rusting faded green station wagon, the kind with fake
wood paneling on the sides, pulled in right behind me.
My heart pounded. My head throbbed. I was afraid. I didn't know where I
was or how to get where I was going. The alley was narrow and I was in the
station wagon's way. In L.A. some people get furious just because you might be
slow off the line when the light turns green.
There was a little patch of grass ahead on my right. I pulled onto it.
There was just enough room to let the station wagon get by. I stared straight
ahead. I didn't dare look behind me. In L.A. eye contact could invite trouble.
The station wagon drove up beside me and stopped. Oh, no! The hair on the
back of my neck rose. I steeled myself for the attack.
"Baby," a woman's voice sang, "are you lost?"
Her voice was so gentle, so kind and warm, so very aloha. Tears of relief,
tears of gratitude, filled my eyes.
Inside that old station wagon were four or five young children. Behind the
wheel was a middle-aged woman, her graying black hair held up with wooden combs,
her eyes looking at me without threat, even without judgment. She smiled, and
in her smile was an embrace.
"Baby," she asked again, "you lost?"
I wasn't lost anymore. I was home.
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