the young man pt. 2

The young man's eyes burned with hurt indignation as he spoke of the father who left him.

A young boy of eleven with trees to climb, forts to build, and girls to love found it hard to understand the pain he felt inside when the older man wasn't around anymore to tell him he loved him and that he was a champion, a tiger, a wild man, and that he had what it took.

The young man squinted his eyes and gave a half-smile, and told me that the only thing he thanked his father for was the sperm that helped create him. And he continued to speak of the man who didn't care to remember his son's birthday twenty years down the road, the man who didn't care to remember the birthdays of his second set of sons, the man who was always making promises, who was always going to be back later, who was going to make it up to him, the man who left his wife, two daughters, and son, Will, alone to go find what he thought was himself, but what turned out to be just smoke and bull-shit.

The young man wiped his mouth on a napkin and then took another bite of his burger.

the young man who desperately wanted success

There was a young man who desperately wanted success. He was a good-natured fellow, blessed in the ways of charm and wit, known most well as a kind and sweet sort of heart among the ladies. Engaged by ideas of romantic candle-lit dinners along the Santa Monica third street promenade and filled with joyful laughter at the prospect of magical evenings spent along the Malibu shore, the young man drank his coffee black with sugar to sweeten the edge, because he desperately wanted success, and sometimes in the dead of night he felt alone.

On his bedside table rested a hardcover book titled “Nobodies to Somebodies,” and on his TV-side shelf there arranged themselves several books of the same variety. “Success” was in each title, and I daresay that not even I could tell them apart. When asked of his reading, the young man politely smiled and commented on the virtues and faults of each, noting the differences I could not have noticed and squinting to remember what struck him the most.

The young man had a book of Van Gogh paintings resting between two of his books on success. He told me of many a lonesome Sunday evening spent relaxed on his conversion couch, staring at amber fields of grain and ferociously drawn bouquets of flowers. Perhaps it was the idea of talent with no earthly fruit which seemed to enchant the young man, as many a different young man has walked the path to almost certain fame and outrageous success at the foot of the hollywood hills, but to find nothing other than all seemingly insurmountable debt and disenchantment.

The city spreads across four thousand square miles of disconnected survivors. Separated by the miles separating Santa Monica from West Hollywood, and downtown from Beverly Hills, they sing to themselves songs of comfort after a weary day of ass-kissing in the fields of suits and ties and important airs, but never to each other. The songs tell them that they’re unique in a uniform culture of entertainers and without fault the product of their own sweat, blood, and hopeless sighs. Even then the songs are never shared between the survivors, though they are often composed of similar melodies and chords.

The young man tells me that he’s thinking of asking his manager out on a date. He says that she likes him and thinks him a sweet natured boy, but that she has a boyfriend so it would not work out. The young man looked indignant as he stared me in the eyes, telling me of his misfortune. Her boyfriend’s name is Will, which is interesting, the young man says, because his name is also Will. I do wonder what the young man would think if he were ever met with the notion that life could be more than six figures a year and five years of fame. Would he laugh? To know that one is not meant for sacrifices, wounds, and broken hearts in the pursuit of something helplessly unable to bring joy is not easy to grasp, still yet embrace.

Would he know that success, with her hard-to-get smile and her "I have a boyfriend named Will, but I still think you're cute" catch phrases held little much in the way of happiness when he was all alone?

Conversations from Academia

Professor: What do you think he means by "though I sang in my chains like the sea?"

Student: I think maybe he's drowning.

-pause-

Professor: Well, he's certainly drowning in time.