I want to write. I teach full time. I have four dogs. I have a hiking habit of at least two hours a day plus an hour commute round-trip to Mission Trails. I feel my life slipping away as I approach, reach, and pass forty, and I’m desperate to get something done. I don’t know what to write, so I write a lot of long letters to people in Germany and a couple men who live just across town. I fill journals. I write stories that are little more than transcriptions of my conversations with friends. “Do you HAVE an imagination at ALL?” asks my brilliant Indian friend Madhu. “There’s nothing in this thing you call a story beyond our conversation from yesterday!”“That’s a story!”
But he’s put a bug in my ear.
There might be something more to writing than all that “write what you know” stuff. Maybe an artist will write what he doesn’t know, hasn’t seen, and doesn’t exist. Maybe that’s a rationale behind art (I always believed it was) but I don’t have anything better than my own life and the odd conversations and events happening around me. Sometimes it really gets to me, and I shut the front door, turn off all the lights and hide in my room to write in front of the tiny black and white screen of my Mac Classic. One such night, the night after we start making our film, there is a persistent knock on the front door. I try ignoring it.
I’m fed up, fuming. “Fuck!” I think, “I told them, dammit. I told them I wanted to write!" I get up and go to the door, preparing to yell or to help, depending.
Expecting Jimmy, I'm surprised to see Mikey alone.
“Martha, can we talk for a while?”
“Mikey, what? I told you I wanted time to myself. I'm writing.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Stories."
“Why?”
“I want to be a famous writer, Mikey. That’s my dream.”
“Since when?”
“Since always.”
“I didn’t know that.”
Mikey sighs, looking straight ahead into the street.
“I don’t want you to be a famous writer. I just want you to be a Martha with a red truck."
I give up and sit down on the porch beside him.
“Martha, this was the best day of my whole life. I love our movie.”
We'd spent the day filming. It WAS wonderful, but exhausting.
The boys showed up early wearing their best BMX costumes, with fancy numbers on the fronts of their bikes. They’d seen BMX films on X-treme sports shows and somehow thought what we were doing would be of that caliber. They learned pretty quickly that while I, director and cameraman ,was passionate, and would lie sweating in the dirt between the humps of The Doubles for hours just to capture that great and dangerous shot (I could get spiked in the chest if there was a crash, a wheel came off and a fork came down), I could also forget to remove the lens cap. When we realized this, we’d already been filming for nearly an hour, the sun was gruelingly high in the sky, and the boys were tired. Undaunted, and laughing at me, they dusted themselves off and we started again.
Hours later, we were back at my house, watching. The boys emptied the fridge onto the Chinese table in my living room, covered it with paper plates, bread, cold meat, mayonnaise and mustard, chips, bottles of soda.
The shots from the ground as the boys arced above The Doubles, against the bright blue sky, took our breath away. I loved the talk, the boys behind me commenting in their language, their way. No one thought of that; we had been intent on images. We had thought of music and talked about a sound track, but their own talk was so good, alive and vital.
When they finally left, I was drained. I needed time to alone to ride my own unicycle through the time warp, to pound the keyboard in an activity that just could not be futile, to practice my own 180’s and can-cans and hope to god somehow I’d learn to write, I loved it so. I knew that tomorrow would be more of the same, the boys would arrive at 8, we'd be back at the jumps by 9. Early is better on Sunday; lots of kids go to church and we’ll have it all to ourselves. Again, I’d lie in the dirt and point the camera at them and they’ll yell at me about the lens cap. We'd leave earlier, after eating at Taco Smell, since Jimmy and the others had to get back to IB that night for school Monday, and I also had to prep for school. I had wanted this night, but I would not have it.
A lump rises in my chest, and time slows way down as the beauty of this moment sinks into my soul. A half-moon peeks through the branches of a eucalyptus tree across the street. It’s nearly 11. Truffle pants softly behind the closed screen door. I reach behind me to open it, and she comes out, lies down beside us and pants some more. I put my arm around Mikey. He’s here because his happiness is too big for his mom’s tiny house. I don’t have to be a famous writer tonight. "I love our movie, too, Mikey."
