City of Angels

How do you pack your life in a suitcase?

What do you carry?

Clothes?

Passports?

What do you look for when you have just 5 mins to find EVERYTHING that is valuable to you before …it burns down?

Before the life, the house, your dream, everything that meant something to you burns down or rather IS burning down

You always hear about these things but when it happens to you, its…

I was away. I have always been “AWAY” – Exactly like my ex-wife and kids and many people who have ever tried to get close to me have said and meant it.

Away from the madness of LA, the city that put my name in Wikipedia pages

You have seen me, somewhere. You will not know my name. That I am sure of.

I am one of those faces that makes you smile, but you aren’t sure why.

As soon as I heard about the fires and the route it was taking.

I took that flight, then that taxi ride from LAX and then just stood outside my own home.

But by the time I reached there the flames had reached my house

I could hear the Fire brigade, but they were not coming for my house. Yet

They had more important homes to protect.

Homes belonging to faces which can be recognized in Antarctica and Mongolia

Faces that are welcome in Russia and China and North Fucking Korea.

Their homes need to be saved first. Yes, I said Homes, because I have been in many of them.

I used to be invited to perform. To entertain

But I have not seen a camera for more than 20 years now

I should run into the house. I mean , my HOME.

But my eyes and mind do not seem to be in sync with my feet that are ready to run inside

.

I am trying to calculate

I know the decision that I need to make, quickly.

What should I take from the house?

My awards, I had many of them lined up again the wall, but each one mocked back at me ..

all these homes that they show on these stupid reality TV shows, where these real estates agents are trying to sell them in my neighborhood.

they talk about these homes like some kind of object.

“These many bedrooms, these many bathrooms”

When your entire house is burning down, when you have less than 10 mins to collect and find everything that ever meant anything to you, having a 6-bedroom house is a curse.

I didn’t know this when I bought this house.

This was one of the first homes with an infinity pool,

An infinity pool for someone who doesn’t even know how to swim.

Yeah, but I had to have it,

It seemed like the ultimate “fuck you” to life

Like a headline in a magazine that read –

“here is the man who cannot swim and yet he has a huge house with a INFINITY pool

How stupid was I

All that water in that pool today cannot extinguish the flames burning down this home.

If honestly, I could give them that water, I would not want them to save my house

What do you save?

People do not want their homes to be saved

They want their lives to be saved.

Their life, the way they know it, inside their home.

Those memories, those tears, those joys, laughter

These homes are the canvas over which we paint our lives, hoping that someday someone will take notice.

Seems like a scene straight out of a film,

In  this tinsel town where everyone’s eyes have become so used to looking at their own life like a movie

When did water become a bystander to Fire?

Should not it tame the fire

I am inside the house now, but its a blur.

smoke everywhere.

I wondered, why should I even run out,

It will be so easy,

Just lie down here

Just for a few minutes

It will be over soon

What will I do outside anyway?

It feels like a final funeral for my physical body

My career, my name, my work has long been lost

Except in Wikipedia pages, I am not alive or visible anywhere

Maybe this is the funeral I have been waiting for

And unlike manmade funeral this one is natural, made by the Higher Power

What else could be better than this

Is not this the perfect end.

This show called my life, that would have bored any audience and had bored the lights out its main character. The character who had been waiting to bid adieu, and leave the stage but somehow had not fought the guts to do so.

And so, he had been performing or kinda just moving his arms and legs and eyes around but had long stopped acting or even trying to act.

Perhaps the fire was doing a good thing after all;

Putting an end to this man’s misery. Like that of many a people who lived on these hills.

So high atop the city that but far below their own depths.

Trying, not to touch the skies, or see how far they had come, but simply to make the journey upwards sooner, faster, because everyone knows how bad the traffic gets in LA.

It was a good run after all. Sure, I did not get to win an Oscar even after all those nominations but at least I did not  live long enough to win one of those Lifetime achievement awards.

That shit is worse than death. Nobody wants that.

I would much rather do a porno. Mind you, I was offered many especially those Japanese ones.

But then, those were not my type. I am more the Boogie Nights kinda guy,.

By now the fumes were inside me, gobbling up space inside my throat.

I felt like I needed to find something

I ran to my storage room.

There in that, box, or one of those boxes

I found an Oscar. MY OSCAR

It was the fake one that I had rehearsed many times in front of many mirrors.

Somehow it had managed to be with me. from that town in Omaha when I first got it till now

I kept my Oscar aside and started opening those boxes. Each box revealing a quick shot of my life

Now was not the time for Nostalgia.

In one of those boxes, I found what I was looking for

There they were

 My scripts

Pages and pages that never saw the light of the day

Never read by anyone other than me

Not made into a movie or a book or even a spec script for a Pilot

Ideas for short films, over 100 pages for a screenplay that was not completed

Pages written and obsessed over the last two or three decades that had resigned to their fate of dying

I filled my suitcase with those scripts

They could not die here

They needed to see the light of the day

These stories deserved to be told, perhaps not by me,

By Somone who was perhaps more passionate, had that fire,

Yes the fire to take them and make them into something

But I did not want those fears, those hidden dreams, those years spent in trying to be more to burn away tonight

As I ran towards the door, I could sense something getting heavy and light at the same time

My feet were heavy and my head was lights.

The embers and the fire seemed to mesh in one as though trying to get this house burnet down so that they could move on to the next house. Like a serial killer with many more lives to take.

They too knew that they hard a short window before the fire engines came and stopped them or at least tried to stop them.

The last thing I remember is falling.

Not known where I would land up.

Hands still clutching that suitcase. With all my scripts and my other hand holding onto my Oscar.

Before my eyes closed, I could see footsteps

The City of Angels had not forgotten me after all.