FRESH YARN presents: The Big Bounce... by Julia Ruchman

FRESH YARN presents:

The Big Bounce
By Julia Ruchman

For months now, I've been having this falling dream. It's nothing suicidal. I'm not about to jump off a bridge or a tall building or anything. I just start falling. But, usually -- no, always -- I end up in New York. First, I'll be sitting in my office on Santa Monica Boulevard and I'll just fall through my chair, through the floor, through Mr. and Mrs. Benson's apartment, into the parking garage, through the ground, through the underground infrastructure of pipes and wires and then all of a sudden I'll be standing in the middle of Union Square and some homeless guy will hit me up for subway fare. That's my falling dream. I guess you could say I miss New York.

I was recently asked to write my bio for this theatre group I joined. Just a couple lines that could go in the program. This is what I wrote:

"Julia left New York against her better judgment to pursue a writing career. She now lives in Los Angeles where she regularly ignores questions like 'Who's your agent?"' and 'Are those real?'"

I am not yet fond of LA.

I shared these feelings with a friend of mine. She thought I might be suffering from a cosmic imbalance, and recommended I see her spiritual herbalist. Inexplicably, I did. His name was Dr. Moo.

Dr. Moo used to own a wellness center in Sunset Plaza, which later got bought out by Frankie's Tacos. Then he moved to Laurel Canyon, but a gypsy stole his chi and he never got it back. After that, he turned down a bungalow in Venice because the ocean air was too silty. The silt gets into the air and aggravates your chakras. You have to drink turtle piss to flush them out. It's a really big problem. Dr. Moo is a complex man.

Because of his traumatic experiences with bad chi, Dr. Moo became a hermit. Which is totally easy to do in LA. All you have to do is sell your car. Everyone will think you're really deep and pay you lots of money to analyze their shame cycles.

Now he lives in the Valley, which means you have to drive by lots of "Super Cuts" and porno shops to get to his temple of peace. At my first visit, Dr. Moo made me sit on these bamboo mats that smelled like soggy beef tenderloin. They're organic. He rubbed tea tree oil on my temples and told me to focus on something positive. I told him that the reason I'd come to see him was that I COULDN'T focus on something positive. He just shook his head and chanted "La, La, La, Shanti, La".

I closed my eyes and went way, way back to the oldest, purest thing I could remember. When I was a little girl, I used to feed the chickadees outside my Mom's kitchen window. For those of you who don't know, chickadees are completely amazing bouncers. They bounce in this disturbingly innocent way, like if you scooped one up and flung it to the ground it would just ricochet and come back for more. Boing, boing, boing, all over the front yard.

Then, one day, I saw one get eaten by a snake. The chickadee bounced onto the pavement with a big nasty thud and then just sat there. I still don't know why. It didn't bounce away. It didn't even try. Not even when it saw the snake out of the corner of its eye. It was almost like the chickadee was accepting its fate. The snake didn't care. It snapped the thing up and just glug, glug, glugged it all the way down. I imagined the chickadee sliding into the snake's dark, smooth, liquidy belly before disappearing into nothing. That's when I realized that Dr. Moo was still chanting and that this was NOT a positive image. I was a big, fat failure at constructive visualization.

I explained all this to Dr. Moo and he told me that my inner sense of self and my outer sense of self were playing each other in a spirited game of table tennis. The only problem was that it had turned violent and both selves were now bashing each other on the heads. Or bashing themselves on the heads. They're confused about who's who. Dr. Moo said it's my personal paradox and that I should meditate about it. This displeased me.

The image of the poor, sweet, fluffy chickadee being brutally digested by the snake is not an easy one to forget. It was stuck with me now. Even worse, it got me thinking about mortality. Which is really the last thing you need when you're living in LA and you'd really, really rather not be. In Los Angeles, you need a top agent to get you into the really good cemeteries. My last agent couldn't even get me a meeting at the Oxygen network.

That night, I had my falling dream again. Except this time I didn't end up in New York. I ended up in a snake pit. I slid down into a snake's dark, smooth, liquidy belly before disappearing into nothing. I woke up shaking. My hair was sticking to my sweaty cheeks and my head was pounding. "Where the hell am I, and what the fuck am I doing here?"

These are the perfect feelings to be having right before you walk into a job interview, which is exactly where I was going in the morning. It was an interview for a job writing for a crappy new TV show on a crappy new network. In LA, these kinds of interviews are called "meetings" to take some of the pressure off and make it OK for you to wear jeans. I grew up on the East Coast where a job interview is a job interview and never, ever involves jeans. I wore a blazer, skirt and heels. They were all from Ralph Lauren. Like I said -- East Coast.

The "meeting" was at the producer's house, which was inside a gated community, inside another gated community up near the Hollywood sign. I have no idea why he felt he needed all these gates. Any burglar stupid enough to rob a producer's house (I mean, really, he'd never work in this town again), would also be too stupid to find the place. The Mapquest directions were eight pages long. And, trust me, there was nothing worth stealing. I mean, who would want a log carved with a chainsaw to look like a cockatoo? That thought occurred to me right before I heard the baby screaming in the next room.

The baby's name was Avocado and so already you know he's destined for tabloid hell. But, little matter. We sat up in the producer's office and he asked me about all the fancy, Hollywood people whose names are on my resume all while his son was screaming his guts out in the other room. For the first couple of minutes he ignored the baby and said things like, "So, what was it like working with ________ ? I've heard she's a raving loon." But Avocado soon became impossible to ignore. The producer got up and left, then brought the baby into the office and rocked him back and forth. But to no avail. Then, he said the most disturbing thing anyone has ever said to me in a professional setting. EVER. And, I have worked with __________ and she IS a raving loon. He said:

"Little Avocado has two Daddies, so he desperately misses breasts. Here, you try!"

And he thrust the child into my arms. Avocado immediately spit up all over my Ralph Lauren suit. (I've had similar male reactions to my breasts -- not to say it wasn't still alarming). I composed myself. This was an interview after all, and it required an elaborate dance -- one that had come to define my life in LA. I had to show Avocado's Daddy how fantastic I would be for the job without showing him how badly I wanted the job and how desperately I NEEDED the job. Need is bad. Never show need. Instead, you have to show apathy. Absolutely, positively not giving a fuck gets you hired.

I held the baby; while inside my head, I was screaming, "Fuck you and your fucking stupid, lame-ass, utterly ridiculous gates and your pathetic son with his pathetic name and how dare you -- I got dressed up for this and gave up five hours of writing time to sit in my fucking station wagon on the fucking freeway and your fucking horrible show is going to get cancelled after three episodes anyway. So why the fuck should I care what you think about my resume?" Even though I did. But instead I said: "Oh, how sweet. But, really, my breasts are nothing special."

And producer man laughed and I rocked his son to sleep while he asked me about everything on my resume except the most interesting parts. Then he changed Avocado's diaper on his $25,000 oak desk and I tried not to look. After that, the interview was pretty much over. The producer didn't even offer to pay my dry cleaning bill, let alone thank me for soothing little Avocado with my breasts. With my most apathetic voice, I wished him luck with his show.

I followed the eight pages of Mapquest directions back to the freeway. And that's where I broke. I started crying -- violent, mushy, oozing tears -- while parked in traffic in the center lane. An ICM agent in a black Mercedes was parked next to me. He looked over at me, bawling my eyes out, then rolled up his window and turned on the radio. This just made me cry harder. I thought about the producer and how shitty he had made me feel, and what a dysfunctional man Avocado was going to become, and how I missed New York, and snakes, and chickadees, and felt lost in LA. The two selves playing tennis in my head started a championship game. The bashing was overwhelming. I tried to meditate, but I didn't know how. And then traffic started to move.

I guess I must have been thinking about Dr. Moo because my car sort of drove itself to his temple of peace. When I arrived, there was a man waiting to see him. He looked vaguely familiar, but I didn't know from where. Let's just call him Terry. As it turns out, Terry was an Emmy award winning writer who's written for practically every show I grew up loving and a few I still positively adore. He looked at my suit, sticky with baby spit and just smiled. Not a vicious, "Oh God, she left the house looking like THAT?" smile. It was more of a, "Yeah, I've been there too" smile. For the first time, I understood what people mean when they say that someone has good energy. I wanted to talk to Terry for hours.

Dr. Moo's assistant, Hurricane, came out and said that Dr. Moo was going to be awhile and so I told Terry about my chickadee and snake memory. Afterwards I said:

"LA has an alarming lack of chickadees. Perhaps this explains why no one here understands the brilliance of bouncing. See, bouncing is all about coming back for more. And in Los Angeles, people just hit the pavement with a big, nasty thud and then wait around to get eaten by the snake."

Then, Terry laughed. It was clear and round and echo-y and when he was finished laughing he asked me how long I'd been coming to see Dr. Moo. I said it was only my second time, and he recommended I keep coming. Apparently, Dr. Moo is absolutely brilliant at solving my particular kind of problem. When I asked Terry why, he said:

"Dr. Moo doesn't take everything so seriously. I think you'll be a lot happier when you stop looking for meaning in LA."

I didn't get the job with Avocado's Dad because the show never made it on the air. I still see Dr. Moo once a week. He's teaching me how to meditate, and the table tennis game in my head has turned into a bunch of old ladies playing mah-jong in Palm Beach. Apparently this is a sign of increased wellness.

I don't have the falling dream so much anymore. My new dream is that I'm in heaven and I'm sitting by the pool sipping banana daiquiris with Albert Einstein. Mozart is sun bathing in the nude and Shakespeare is complaining that the kitchen staff didn't put enough artichokes on his pizza. Then, Dr. Moo shows up and spends seven hours analyzing Einstein's shame cycles. Einstein is so moved by the experience that he convinces God to bring Dr. Moo back to life. When Dr. Moo returns to earth, he signs with CAA, books a pilot, lands a development deal and gets Oprah to produce his special, "Moo Goes Home Again".

I wake up smiling. Not a "God, I've become a raving loon!" smile. More of a "Yeah, I've been there too" smile. Terry was right. You can't be too serious about living in LA. Every day, something else will scoop you up and fling you to the ground. But that's OK. You can just bounce right back.