The 405 Girl

Imagine picking up a homeless person and taking them home.  No?  Not a great idea?  How about picking up an optional gender prostitute and doing the same?  Are you saying desperate times breed desperate measures?

You’d have to be some kind of crazy person to get involved in any kind of activity of this sort.

Hi.

Because that’s what I did.

But she wasn’t homeless.  Nor a prostitute.  If you were to ask her now, she would probably say she was an ad executive or a personal hygiene specialist in the making, like a butterfly before her cocoon stage; a caterpillar.

Or she’s dead now.

But I’m fairly certain I could get her to agree she was a waif.  In the classic sense.  Wherever she is.

Either way, it doesn’t matter.  I’m the one in question now.  Just –– Just give me a chance to explain.

—

It was a night of revelations at the Landmark Forum, business as usual.  The Hilton seminar room was filled with 200-plus people, most of them invited, encouraged or inspired to look to the left of themselves, look to the right of themselves, and re-discover that the person next to them is a stanchion of possibility.  What is a “possibility”?

Here is the Landmark Forum’s bread and butter.  The Landmark Forum’s ontological technology was created by Werner Erhart in his EST (Erhart Seminar Training) courses which hit some public infamy in the 1970s for “brainwashing” people.  Thereafter he went underground, re-tooled the technology and sold it to a new entity that re-branded itself as Landmark Education, this time dispensing itself of a figurehead vulnerable to public scrutiny.

The technology proposes that any person can transcend their own personal weaknesses, fears, emotional blocks, prejudices or blind spots in order to become the person they truly want to be.  This is what it means to be a possibility––always in motion, always in potential.

Heady stuff.

You mean I can be anything I want?

That is the feeling you carry out of the Hilton parking lot after one of their intense seminar weekends.  People weep in public, announce in front of a large crowd their own intimate confessions, whether it be coming out of the closet, admitting to a heretofore-unspoken molestation, the too-little-too-late love of a deceased family member, and –– don’t worry –– there is always an insurgent smattering of folks who don’t believe any of this bullshit and just white-knuckle their way through the 3-day seminar hoping nobody prods at their personal issues.

Yet they all come to pay Disneyland-sized money to become better than themselves.  At this time in the late 1990s, Tony Robbins had made a public figure of himself with his “Awaken the Giant Within” books and courses.  It’s the same idea.  “Brainwashing?” “Enlightened?” or “Personal growth?”  It’s always going to be a wild ride if you really have the guts to lean into it.  If you don’t, you have to drive home on any seminar night relinquished to the fate of being your boring self for the rest of your life.  Same patterns, same “Uh…my mind just drew a blank” reflexes, those emotional blocks your poor little brain has triggered for just the kind of traumatic alerts you unwittingly built as a child.

I’m not a crazy person––no, not yet.  But my makeup is such that I will jump into an experience like this, free of security blankets or lifeline tethers because I’m also the type who gets very sick of himself.

So why not.  I dug my heels in and got into it this particular night, not unlike any other Forum night I paid good money for, built on something of a promise that I could save the world and meet girls at the same time.

So I drove out of the hotel parking structure feeling like I could conquer the world.  Like I could embrace humanity again, like I don’t have to be lonely anymore.  Hey!  We are all connected!  We are all the same in our peculiar, unique and certainly charismatic specialness.

I drove up Culver Blvd beneath the 405 overpass looking to mount the northbound onramp, heading onto a 3/4 loop to get on the freeway heading home, but for a lone and slight-shouldered figure putting out a thumb to hitch a ride.  Behold, it was a girl––a girl hitchhiking just within the evening streetlight shadows of the freeway overpass, a girl who was not nappy-haired or frothing at the mouth.

This was my chance to save the world by saving one person, if not myself.  So I pulled over and let her into my car with her shoulder bag, then continued my loop onto the freeway

She wasn’t particularly pretty, but she had short hair, always a plus for me.  The outward appearance of a tomboy has always connoted for me that a girl is strong and self-confident, up for adventure, not concerned with breaking a nail.  But this one looked at me with bewildered, uncertain eyes.  I got the distinct feeling she was running away from something.

After driving a few minutes and talking a few basics of introduction, I found out she didn’t know where she wanted to go or where she would stay the night.

As I was due to arrive to my Hollywood apartment in ten minutes, she still couldn’t tell me where she was going.  Should I have grown suspicious?  Was this about the time she would stick a switchblade in my ribcage and threaten to rob me?  No.  Something in our idle talk led me to sense she was not an imminent threat to my personal safety.  Rather, this is when I offered that she could –– this to a girl I had just picked up on the street –– stay the night with me.

I didn’t mean “sleep” with me.  I didn’t mean sleep in my bed.  I told her quickly enough that I had space on the carpet, or even that she could sleep in my bed and I would take the carpet.

I meant it, and I told her so.  But who was I at this time?  I already told you I was just coming off the high of infinite possibility and Save the World! and all that fun stuff.  What I haven’t quite sufficiently emphasized yet is how incredibly lonely I was at this time of my life, back in L.A. for only two years after having lived in New York City for nine.  It wasn’t that I wanted to have sex with this stranger girl, it’s just that I wanted company, simply a friend, all the better if female.  Someone I could make confessions to, or someone whose confession I could make safe and secure.  Most truly, I just wanted someone with whom I could share the passions of youth, like in those late night talks we college students used to have in the dorms, to get away from the adult seriousness of life now having started to slowly crush me since my return to L.A., the cold reality of getting a real job, paying real rent, facing the withering prospects weekly of finding a date, hell, just finding a friend.

Now that I’ve been married 20 years, I look back and wonder why I was in such a rush to find a girlfriend and get married.  All those freedoms I gave up just to have a companion?  Only now do I begin to see what I couldn’t twenty-four years ago as I carried the 405 girl in my passenger seat up the freeway.  How I missed the intensity of companionship, the trials, the attentive care, the daily challenges from nine years in the Big Apple.

That’s why I offered that she could spend the night at my place.  Not to fuck her.  I promise.

And the funny thing is –– she almost accepted.  We drove for a total of thirty minutes up the 405 from Inglewood/LAX area toward Hollywood without her having made a decision.  She must have been truly lost that night to have considered it for as long as she did.

Finally, as we drew closer to my apartment in West Hollywood on Poinsettia Drive, she grew tense.  She said to drop her off on some corner somewhere.  Cell phones were not ubiquitous back in the late 1990s, so she could not have sent a surreptitious text message.  But nevertheless she said she was going to a friend’s house, though the exact destination of the place seemed to drift.  I knew she was scared and wanted to get out of the car quickly.  I did my best to not make her feel threatened, but who knows––maybe I came off as a creep.  “So gentle, so nice and understanding…”  Until I have her in my lair, right?  Maybe I myself didn’t even know what I was capable of that night, caretaking a lost waif in my bedroom.  Maybe I would have groped for her in the dark.  God knows, I am still condemned to carry many intense memories of welcome gropings in the dark from my late teens and early 20s.  Maybe I just wanted to keep living that slowly evaporating dream of youth.

So I pulled over on some scarcely lit corner on Melrose Avenue and let her off.  She thanked me hastily and made her way with her handbag into the darkness of a side street.  I pulled away and drove home to my lonely one-room apartment and eventually made it to sleep, careful not to think about what in my lonely desperation I could have been capable of that night.