absence

I've neglected this page. Not that I imagine anyone's on tenterhooks waiting for my next post; I just don't like to let things go unattended. I'm a doer,  a list-maker; my father's daughter, I like to "git 'er done." But sometimes your list gets shot to shit. Sometimes life gets in the way.  Earth-shattering life, the kind where you lose your footing as sure as if a temblor had passed beneath you. I said goodbye to my dear, sweet mama in September, and things have looked very different since then. I'm sure a lot of you know first-hand all that comes with that. If that's true for you, please know you have my sympathies. Sincerely.

Thousands of miles separated us, but my mom and I talked nearly every day on the phone. We had a system worked out, a code. She'd call from Pennsylvania in the morning once she was up so that when I woke on the west coast three hours later, I'd see her missed call and know she was okay. I'd have my coffee then ring her once I'd dropped Wyatt at school. All these months later, it's the rare morning that goes by when I don't have that split-second thought to pick up the phone to call her on my drive back from dropping Wyatt at the train. Every time, I shake my head as if to clear something stuck, then give her my monologue on the thises and thats of my life out loud.

Being with my brother (my rock) at our mother's bedside those days-turned-into-nights-turned-into-goodbye was one of the greatest gifts of my life. There's a long story I won't tell here, but trust me when I say I know that my mother in all her stubbornness and strength willed everything that happened so I could be across the country with her and Joel when she left. She was a force to be reckoned with, Dona was. She was a light. She was a laugher, a dancer, a hoot. She was fiercely loyal and could hold a grudge like nobody's business, but one kind word and she'd melt like butter on burnt toast (her favorite.) She baked a Texas sheet cake so delicious you'd want to eat it by the fistful and preferred Pepsi to Coke. She is so very, dearly missed.

But our Dona instilled in me a fair amount of her iron strength--I am also my mother's daughter--and slowly, surely, I'm finding my footing once again. The path just looks very different now.

raccoons be crazy. or is it me?

Once again instead of walking the trash to the dumpster right away, I left it outside my front door overnight. And once again, a raccoon got into it leaving a huge, disgusting mess for me to clean up. I could shake my little fists at the sky and curse the deceptively adorable ball of filthy fur. But what good would that do?

A raccoon will be a raccoon. It will get hungry and look for things to eat. When it finds things to eat, it will use its tiny, fierce claws and teeth to tear apart whatever contains the treasures. It will get what it needs.

I can't fault the little critter for that and even if I could, I can't change its behavior; it would be silly of me to do anything other than expect it to behave like a large scavenging rodent. All I can do is look at my own part in the situation and change my behavior so that I can get what I need. Solution: straight to the dumpster next time.

Thanks, scoundrel teacher, for the life lesson/terribly obvious metaphor for relationships of all kinds. I owe you a snack.

Photo courtesy of the states of Missouri & Illinois, I guess.

darrion, on the first day of spring

He was teeny, just sitting there on the corner curb, dark head in small hands at the ends of little bird arms. When I reached him I stopped, asked him if he was okay. He looked up at me, big chocolate eyes too tired for their years. He said simply, “No.”

I’d been on my way home from a head-clearing walk in my neighborhood. It was going on seven o’clock, and the sun would be setting soon. Wyatt was staying at his father's house this night, and a quiet evening lay in front of me: a little scotch, maybe some ‘Bleak House’ on Netflix and an early bedtime. This was an unexpected turn of events. I looked around for an adult who might belong to him but saw no one, and I asked if I could sit down next to him for a chat. I told him my name, and he told me he was Darrion.

“Are you in trouble?”

“Sorta.”

“You want to tell me?”

“My mom kicked me out the house.”

“Hmh. Where do you live?”

“She was drinking, so she was mad. Compton.”

“How’d you get so far away from home?”

“Trains. Then I just started walking. I’ve never been to Hollywood before. Lots of big houses here.”

He seemed to enjoy the idea that he'd made it to Hollywood; I didn't tell him he'd  missed the mark by a few miles. I'm sure that, compared to parts of Compton, my modest San Fernando Valley neighborhood must have seemed to him like another part of the world entirely.

“It’s going to be night soon. Do you have anywhere to go?”

“Just my mom’s. But I can’t go back there.”

“How old are you, Darrion?”

“Eleven,” he said.

****************

Eleven. Hmh. We sat there for a bit while I squinted off across the street, trying to wrap my head around our situation. Did he have anyone to call? No. I asked him whether he’d eaten and if he was hungry. No, and yes. I copped to the fact that I wasn’t sure what I should do, but I thought that calling the police was probably the right thing. That I thought I’d call the police while we walked to my apartment, and then I’d make him some dinner. Did that sound okay? It did, he said.

We stood up and he came with me without hesitation; we walked together while I dialed 911. The dispatcher asked the usual stuff, where we were, the emotional state of the boy. Studio City, I answered. Quiet and calm, I said. She also asked questions I had to pass along to Darrion. His full name. His mother’s name. His school. He told me and I repeated the answers into the phone. His full address and his mom’s phone number? Darrion came up empty on these. He did know the street he lived on though, so I passed that along. The dispatcher took my info and told me a squad car would be with us shortly.

By this time, we’d reached my building. Darrion commented on how big it is (it’s just four units, but I suppose it’s all relative), and we said hello to my nice neighbors who were gathered with their extended family outside, all of them enjoying the warm night and cooing and fussing over the neighbors’ beloved four-month old boy. It was a happy sight, all laughter and familial love, and I wondered what Darrion made of it as I unlocked my door and invited him inside.

We headed for the kitchen where I got him seated at the table and started figuring out what he might like to eat. Something hot, I thought. Did he like soup? Soup it was. While that heated on the stove, I sliced up an apple and some cheese and we talked a bit more. He told me the woman he calls his mother isn’t, really. He’s never actually known his biological mom. He was handed off to his Granny when he was born, and then at age four a grown cousin was made his official guardian. She was the one who had turned him out. She works as a manager at a cafeteria, he said. She had stopped drinking for a while but this time was a bad one, he said. He thanked me each time I put something on the table for him, and he ate slowly and carefully. 

The dishes from my lunch were still in the sink, and I turned my attention to them to give Darrion a little peace while he had his supper. He'd mentioned that he liked music, all kinds of music, so Pandora played on the computer. We listened to the Lumineers station, either or both of us occasionally humming along. Sometimes we were just quiet together, him eating, me cleaning. I turned at one point to put something in a cupboard and felt almost surprised to see him there, this little boy in basketball shorts and a baseball cap sitting at my table.

It had been a few moments since either of us had spoken when Darrion told me his mom had given him a bad haircut. He said it very matter-of-factly, and as I went to him to ask what he’d meant, he took off his ball cap for the first time. All over his head, wide swaths of his hair had been shaved off revealing his scalp underneath; the effect was not unlike a field that had been mowed by a malicious, out-of-control tractor with no one at the wheel to stop it. My breath caught in my chest—it was as if he had rolled up a sleeve and revealed cigarette burns. I asked him if he knew why she had done that to him. He said it had been an attempt to embarrass him at school. She’d been mad about something he’d said, and this was the punishment she'd chosen. He said it all without emotion, but I could tell it cost him something, that he’d had to muster up the courage to tell me. He put his cap back on and went back to his soup.

By the time the police arrived, Darrion had finished eating and was trying out peppermint tea with honey for the first time. He liked how it smelled, he said, cupping his hands around the mug. There was a strong knock on the door, and I left him there at the table promising to return. When I opened the door there were two officers, both on the young side, both men. I motioned for them to come in, but they asked me to step outside for a few questions first. It occurred to me then that, of course, these officers knew nothing about me—I could potentially be a bad guy in this scenario. I answered their questions, and then they asked to be let inside to talk to Darrion.

The Hispanic one, Officer Hernandez, pulled a chair up next to Darrion and began asking many of the same questions he’d already been asked by me and then by the 911 dispatcher. Darrion answered them patiently. While Hernandez was not unkind, there was a sort of skepticism in his manner, as if he suspected he might find a crack in this unlikely story. I realized I'd felt the same way when I’d first sat down with Darrion on the curb; the idea that a kid as little as he was could make his way so far from home on his own had at first seemed somewhat suspect to me, but I think I had just not wanted to believe it could be true. Hernandez said he needed to look inside the backpack, and Darrion took it off his back for the first time that night. A search inside revealed nothing more than a pair of pants and some slippers, exactly what Darrion had told me he’d managed to grab before he left the house.

Officer #2 was Caucasian with a quiet, gentle manner. He pulled me aside and took more information, asked for my ID, took notes on a small pad. He also looked around the place a bit. It’s been a long time since I’ve had cops in my home, but the feeling wasn’t unfamiliar. Like Darrion, I grew up with someone who drank too much and sometimes became violent, and whenever the police came I’d always felt like I was under suspicion as much as anyone was. I felt relieved to have smiling pictures of Wyatt around the place, on the fridge. “See?” I hoped the photos said, “this is the home of a law-abiding citizen with a happy, healthy son of her own. No reason to be suspicious here, officer.”

While #2 talked to me, my attention kept getting pulled back toward Darrion. I was worried he might feel intimidated by the officers. I had no idea what experience he’d had with police, but I was relatively sure it wasn’t the first time he’d run into them either. When my interview was done, I sat near Darrion and listened in on his. Hernandez’s tone still sounded condescending, not in a way that Darrion seemed to notice, but I could sense it. I silently willed Darrion to show them his head, to tell them what he had told me, and as if on cue he took off his cap and told the story. The room became very still, very quiet. The four of us sat there in silence for a moment. Finally, Hernandez exhaled slowly as if he'd been holding his breath. When he spoke this time, his tone was utterly changed. Nobody should treat you like that, buddy, he said softly. You didn’t deserve that.

I excused myself to find some books that I’d promised Darrion he could take with him and went upstairs to Wyatt’s room. Sitting on my heels while I searched the bookcase, I allowed myself for a moment to imagine my own son on the streets alone.  I pushed the thought away, found the books I was after and rejoined the others downstairs.

Hernandez and #2 were telling Darrion all about the police station they were going to take him to. Had he been inside a real live police station before? He hadn’t, he said. We’ll give you the VIP tour, they promised. He seemed to like that idea. I showed Darrion the books, one about sharks, the other about racecars, and felt grateful for the whistle of approval Hernandez let out when he saw how they opened up to show 3D versions of the inner workings of both. Darrion smiled for what I’m pretty sure was the first time that night, and #2 helped him get the books into the backpack while I poured the rest of Darrion’s peppermint tea into a to-go cup.

Hernandez asked Darrion if he felt ready to leave. Darrion nodded his head and they walked outside into the night to the squad car waiting across the street.  #2 and I held back. Will you let me know what happens to him? They would, he assured me. We’ll find someplace safe for him tonight, he said. DCFS will be brought in, and if we're lucky we can place him with a family soon. It can be tough, he said. There are so many kids like Darrion, all different ages and colors and sizes and all needing safe homes. I was familiar with the process, I told him. I’d spent a year as a social worker in Alaska at a shelter for battered women and their kids, and I knew how the system worked. I also knew how it often failed. I started to cry. “I know," #2 said. "I know.”

By the time we got outside, Darrion was sitting behind the wheel of the squad car playing with the controls while Hernandez showed him how they worked. The red and blue lights lit up the dark night. The siren yelped for a few beats. Darrion beamed. #2 said something about candy waiting for them at the station and Darrion scuttled around into the back seat. He looked out at me, said thank you one more time, and waved as Hernandez shut the door. And then they were gone.

Back in my kitchen I paced in circles and talked to myself, trying to reason the evening out in my head. How strange life can be. A different turn down the street that night, I thought, and I’d have been home without ever having seen Darrion as he moved through the neighborhood like a tiny ghost. I remembered Hernandez saying to me before they left, “He’s lucky he found you.”  Others have said that same thing to me since. I understand what they mean, but I don’t know. A little boy who had no reason in the world to trust me or anybody did just that. He let me into his life for a few moments and allowed me to do something that mattered. I’m pretty sure that makes me the lucky one. I'm pretty sure that's right.

© 2013 Deborah Puette

in which i briefly consider punching Alan Ball in the knee, or how i came to be on true blood

I love Alan Ball. Love. Alan. Ball. His work. "Six Feet Under"? Watched every episode and was more affected by the series finale than any other single episode of television I can remember. American Beauty?  I mean...c'mon. I've read, watched, listened to every interview with him I could find. I even wrote him a letter once years ago telling him how much I love his work. And then a few months ago, after years of devouring just about every TV show, movie and play written and/or directed by the man (if you haven't seen Towelhead, you should), I found myself three feet from him during a last-minute audition for a guest star on his fangtastic series, "True Blood."

The call from my manager came at around 11:00 am: I had just under four hours to learn the sides, drive to a coaching session with Robin in Woodland Hills, get back to Studio City to shower and change and get myself to The Lot on Formosa Drive in Hollywood. In the busyness of it all, it hadn't occurred to me that Mr. Ball would be in the session. Duh.

Sitting in the waiting area of the tiny cottage where the casting directors for the show work, I could hear the auditions of the women who went in before me, almost all of whom I recognized from some TV show or another. When my turn came, I was ushered into the little office and introduced by the casting director who motioned me to take my seat in a chair opposite her. There was no camera to record the session. There was, however, the man himself, so close I could have reached out and punched him in the knee.

{A confession: I am a person who regularly flashes on the numerous inappropriate behaviors I might perpetrate at any given moment, and how they would play out. How, if I chose to, I could actually do something as odd as hitting Alan Ball hard on the knee, and would that just blow the whole thing? What would the others in the room do, I wonder. Ask me to stop hitting and please read the scene? Stare at me blankly before calling security? Maybe Alan Ball would hit me back. Would he laugh? Yell? Cheer? The astute reader will note that he has been known to give his characters ruminations just such as these to great dramatic/comedic effect. So I guess my point is that Alan Ball and I are ALMOST THE SAME PERSON. Think about it.}

But instead I replied 'hello' to his same, sat, and proceeded to play the scene with the cd, keenly aware that one of my creative heroes was assessing me and my work but oddly calm in the face of it. The scene ended, it was quiet, and then he said it was good--he made mention of a specific beat in the scene that Robin and I had carved out together. Then he asked me if I could do it again with a slight adjustment. Fight harder for what you want until this line, he said.

{One more digression, if you don't mind: earlier in my career I might have said, "That's a great note!" I don't say that anymore, ever. As true as it might be, there is no way to say that in an audition without sounding like a sycophant, and if I learned anything in kindergarten at all it's that nobody likes a sycophant. And besides, he knows it's a great note. He's ALAN BALL for God's sake.}

I said yes, sure I could, happy to spend another few minutes in this tiny collaboration. Getting the job was the furthest thing from my mind at that point. I'm not being disingenuous here. Getting the job was not in my mind at that moment. This was the work--this was what I'd prepared for. I read the scene again, incorporating the note. And then it was done.

We said our mutual thank yous and goodbyes, and I walked on air across Santa Monica Blvd. to my car. At that point, I had done my job. As ever, the rest was out of my hands. I told my manager on the phone that I had no idea if I'd booked it (You never do! They might want someone shorter. Blonder. More famous. Less famous, although in my case that would be tricky.) But I did know I had shared a little piece of me, of what I do, with this man I'd looked up to for so long, and he'd been lovely. I had, finally, worked with Alan Ball. That was enough for one day.

The episode, entitled "Somebody That I Used to Know" airs July 29 and in it, I play Sarah Compton-Harris, daughter of vampire Bill Compton. The episode happens to be the series directing debut of star Stephen Moyer who plays Bill; simultaneously acting with and being directed by Stephen and playing writer Mark Hudis' terrific writing was very very good fun, but that's for another post.

Thank you, Mr. Ball.

an unorthodox tribute to mothers and my son

The following piece is familiar to many of my friends: I wrote it last year for a performance series called "Rant and Rave" at Rogue Machine here in Los Angeles (where, randomly enough, the packed audience in that little theater included Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban) and later performed it in Chicago with American Blues Theatre Co.'s "Ripped: The Living Newspaper." When I performed it the first time, it got huge, gut-busting laughs through most of it, which is, happily, what I intended. In Chicago, the crowd was more subdued (read: less drunk), but the (dark) comedy still came through. A friend approached me that night--she'd read the essay before the show and was shocked by how much people laughed during the piece. On reading it to herself, she'd only found it heartbreaking. The dichotomy of those reactions make me happy I wrote it.

I'll let you decide for yourself~

My boyfriend and I were not trying to get pregnant. Still prone to tantrums myself, I had enough trouble looking after me and had no interest in anything inconvenient, most unfortunately condoms. But like it or not, and I didn’t, we were having a baby. A curious person might ask, “What about the ‘alternatives?’” and I would tell that person that I seriously considered them but ultimately allowed my own inertia to determine my course.

I’ll be the first to say I didn’t play nice on the schoolyard of pregnancy. Somewhere in my fourth month, a well-meaning aunt thrust a motherhood journal at me meant to hold all the tender thoughts that might flit through my head as my belly distended. I opened it to the page that read “When I found out I was pregnant, the first thing I did was ____________.”  Unversed as I was in the process, I was relatively sure that the litany of obscenities I’d screamed in the bathroom that day the stick turned pink was not what the makers of the happiness journal intended for their pages. I flung the whole thing into a dark cupboard where it languished, memory-free, a symbol of the kind of pregnancy games I would not play.

I didn’t buy maternity clothes; I got by wearing Mark’s jeans and big t-shirts. My reaction to the whole racket of “accessories for baby” was as much my standard fuck-the-establishment posture as it was my denial of the fact that I’d have a baby who needed gear. As far as I was concerned, we’d need three things: clothes to keep the kid warm, diapers to keep him dry and a big pair of tits to keep him fed. If motherhood was going to ambush me this way, it would happen on my terms; I did two shows while I was pregnant, the second of which closed during my eighth month and in which I played a five-year-old in a petticoat. Despite Mark’s vehement protestations, I sometimes still insisted on walking home over a mile through the Chicago winter nights from the waitressing job I obstinately worked til the day of reckoning.

Unlike most dramatized versions I’ve seen, my baby’s birth did not culminate in my bringing him to my breast so that I could smile, weak but blissed-out, into the camera. I had vomited my way through over eight hours of Pitocin-induced labor with zero pain-relieving drugs, and I am here to tell you that while babies appear to be relatively small creatures, when one is CLAWING ITS WAY OUT OF YOUR VAGINA you understand on a cellular level that appearances can be misleading. The moment I was free of him and the agony he’d inflicted on me brought only the sense of triumph one might feel after vanquishing an alien of any sort. I was covered in blood and gore, wild-eyed and primed for further battle; I was victorious, but I was not in love.

Two nights later, a nurse came to release us from the hospital, and Mark left with the baby to sign some papers while I stayed alone in the room to gather the last of our things. Bent over the suitcase, I caught sight of my reflection in the large window that looked down onto Michigan Avenue, Christmas lights reflecting off the snow covered street, and I began to weep. It wasn’t joy or sadness that overtook me in that moment; I was frozen with terror. It was unimaginable to me that these doctors, these people sworn to heal and protect, would make me walk out of the hospital with this tiny person in my care. I knew nothing about parenting and frankly, I didn’t want to. As we drove the short, slippery distance to our little apartment in Lincoln Park, I stared out the window and wondered at the restaurants and bars full of carefree people who seemed not to know that the world had been irrevocably changed.

While marriage was not on the agenda for Mark and me, we intended to live as a family. But I can tell you from having been there that mothering a newborn is a solitary activity no matter the number of people with whom you surround yourself. Yes, it’s important to have a partner there to help, someone with whom to share the kind of desperate loneliness that can only exist when you have an infant in your care. And Mark was an amazing father from the first, going above and beyond his 50% line on the contribution chart. But I was the only mother this baby had, and the responsibility of that regularly sucked the breath out of me, pushed my head under some invisible water line, up through which I’d thrash, gasping for air.

Despite my quiet panic, I nursed my baby on demand, practiced “attachment parenting,” made room for him in our bed. Fat and affable, he reminded me of a miniature Paul Sorvino.  But my concern for his well-being was instinctual; emotional attachment still eluded me. I know this might make me sound like a dickhead, but consider this: I barely knew him, and for as much as he demanded of me, he gave VERY LITTLE in return. The truth of the matter is that newborns can be the most selfish assholes on the planet when they want to be. They move in, take over, and scream orders non-stop regardless of how utterly exhausted and confused the people they’re screaming at might be. They simply don’t care. So you tell me, who’s the dickhead?

But as the chubby interloper grew, so did his ability to connect with the world and, by extension, with me. Now, when his father popped up from behind the bed to surprise him, he would belly laugh until he looked about to burst. Now, when he was hungry, he’d show me one of the signs we’d been teaching him: more, or nurse, or eat. Then, toward the end of one of those warm, fall Chicago days when it seems like the onset of winter might surrender to the sun and change its mind about coming at all, I sat nursing my boy. I was spent, praying silently that the little one would surrender to sleep and give me the one bit of peace I had yearned for all day, when slowly he raised his fat little hand and held my face as gently as if it was made from porcelain. He stared unflinchingly into my eyes, and I stared back, and as we remained that way I felt a shift under me big as if the earth had opened up. I recognized myself in the reflection of those deep, brown pools and again I cried as I had that dark, dark night days after his birth. But this time my tears were borne of a sudden, absolute gratitude that Wyatt had insisted on joining my life, that I was his.

Wyatt is ten now, and he still needs more than I can give him on a regular basis; I still occasionally think my kid’s being a dickhead. But in those years together, I have come to love my boy with a level of devotion usually attributed to fundamentalist terrorist-types living in caves.  We take walks and talk about big concepts like kindness and donuts and the solar system. He asks me questions I can’t begin to answer and regularly stuns me with the person he has become and who I have become because of him. Recently, a moment just such as this inspired the amateur poet in me to write:

 

By day, he's a flash of light,

 top of head reaching to my cheek (!) and movingsofastIcannotkeepup.

Then

night

 falls,

and once again he is four,

 all lashes and sweet breath,

arm slung over my neck,

and I am,

once again, sunk with love.

© 2010 Deborah Puette

 

 

skateland, u.s.a

My son, Wyatt, went rollerskating for the first time last weekend. It was a birthday party for a classmate, and the whole class was there. He was ecstatic to finally get on skates and told me that when I came to pick him up after work, I'd see him zooming around the rink.

Hardly. 

About an hour and a half into the party, I arrived at the rink to the ear-splitting vocals of Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance' (appreciated) and multi-colored lights bouncing off the walls. I was tired. Rehearsal had been a tough one for me; I was disappointed by my work that day, and I really just wanted to get Wyatt, go home and nurse my bruised ego. As my eyes adjusted, I finally caught sight of him, alone at the opposite end of the rink making his way around, a death grip on the outer wall for balance. His progress was painfully slow in comparison to the speeding, dancing skaters around him. Occasionally he'd let go and coast a few feet, then smash violently to the floor. Up to the wall and a few more shuffles, then down again. And so it went until, many long minutes later, he rounded the bend and saw me. The shit-eating grin on his face and wobbly thumbs-up he threw my way were his assurance to me--he was having a blast, knee pads, bruises, sweat and all. His ego was faring just fine. And by the time we left, he was making it with the other skaters all the way around the rink. It wasn't pretty, but he was on his feet and moving forward.

Parent after parent approached me that night to tell me how unbelievably hard it had been for Wyatt to just stand on his skates that first hour. "Even holding onto the wall, he fell a hundred times," one said, adding, "if it'd been me, I'd have quit." I asked Wyatt what had kept him going. Before flailing away toward a friend he'd spotted, he shrugged his shoulders and said, "I really wanted to skate, so I kept getting up."