Finding Happiness in Los Angeles

by Oliver Markus Malloy

  We also went to New York and visited the building they used as the exterior shot on Friends. And I showed her my old stomping grounds in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

  I showed her my favorite museums, and the best food place in the whole wide world: Rice to Riches. It's like an ice cream parlor, but instead of ice cream, they have dozens of rice pudding flavors. Usually I'm not a big fan of rice pudding. But the stuff they sell in Rice to Riches is da bomb. If you ever visit New York, make sure you eat there.

  We got foot massages in Chinatown and ate dinner at a nice restaurant in Little Italy.

  We held hands and took a stroll on High Line, the old elevated train tracks that had been turned into a park. Of course we also went to Time Square and admired all the colorful lights. Sometimes we just stopped and kissed and soaked up the moment. I had never been happier in my life.

  We even went to a taping of the Maury Povich show. That was hilarious. So trashy! We cheered and hollered along as some guy hopped around on stage because Maury told him he was not the baby daddy.

  So if you watch Maury, you might have seen us in the audience.

  It was winter. Shelly and I took a romantic walk through Central Park. It was the first time in her life that she saw snow. It never snows in Hawaii or California.

  It felt good to be part of that moment, when she touched snow for the first time. Her eyes got big and she yelled: "Ohh, it's so cold!" Then she jumped into a big pile of snow and stomped around in it like a little kid.

  I loved seeing her like this. Everyone else thought she was so grown up and serious. A professional businesswoman. But when we were alone, she was her true self. Unguarded and silly. She didn't worry about being respectable and proper around me. She was so playful and funny. She always made me laugh. Nobody knew this side of her. Not even her parents. I was the only one who knew the real her.

  Back in Los Angeles, she had introduced me to her parents. It was a big deal. Now it was my turn to introduce her to mine.

  In December 2015 we flew to Germany for Christmas. It had been two years since I wrote my book in Germany, back in December 2013. And so much had changed since Shelly came into my life in June 2014.

  My parents loved her. Can you imagine if I had brought Veronica or Lucy to Germany? What an epic clusterfuck that would have been!

  My hometown Aachen is pretty centrally located. You can be in Paris or London in under 4 hours. You're in Cologne in an hour. Amsterdam in two.

  So we hopped on a high-speed train and visited Amsterdam. We walked through the red light district and giggled at the half naked girls in the windows, and all the sex shops. They had big dildos, rubber pussies and lifelike naked sex dolls on display in the windows, right out in the open, for the whole world to see.

  It's so funny when you compare how uptight America still is about sex, and then you see how normal it is in Europe, thanks to the sexual liberation in the 1960s. It's everywhere and nobody makes a big deal about it.

  Shelly bought some edible, lifesize chocolate penises for some of her female co-workers back in LA. She said they'd get a big kick out of it.

  We also went to Brussels and admired the fancy golden facades of the opulent guildhalls at the Grand Place. It's spectacular.

  But Brugge is even nicer than Brussels. Shelly and I went to Brugge on our second trip to Belgium the following year.

  If you ever go to Europe, don't forget about Belgium. It's worth it. And I'm not just saying that because I used to live there, before my parents and I moved to Germany when I was in second or third grade.

  Belgium is famous for its chocolate. Forget Godiva. If you've never had Côte d'Or, you have no idea what you're missing. It's my favorite chocolate in the whole world!

  And don't get me started on the colorful little Belgian cakes and desserts. Nothing even close to it exists in America. Except maybe in some of LA's Taiwanese bakeries, like JJ.

  A Belgian dessert is to an American donut, what a Mercedes is to a Trabi. If you've never been outside of America, you have no idea how much amazing stuff the world has to offer.

  Shelly loved K-pop. South Korean pop music. She played some Big Bang songs for me. They were her favorite band. Forget Gangnam Style. Go to YouTube right now and check out Big Bang's music video Fantastic Baby. It's so poppy and catchy and colorful and weird. Like modern art!

  One of Big Bang's members started a solo career. Check out G-Dragon's music videos Heartbreaker and Crayon. K-pop is like candy for the brain. So colorful and crazy. I loved it!

  Shelly and I ended up going to a Big Bang concert. We had a great time. She sang along in Korean. She knew all the lyrics by heart. She learned Korean from Big Bang songs, the same way I learned English from watching Married with Children and The A-Team on Dutch TV.

  The concert was at a huge sold-out arena. Thousands of shrieking Asian girls!

  And me.

  I think I was the only white guy there. I stood out like a sore thumb. I was about two feet taller than everyone else in the stadium. I felt like Gulliver in Lilliput.

  When our favorite American band, Fall Out Boy, came to LA, we went to one of their concerts, too. Oddly it was mostly teenage girls in the audience again.

  Are grown-ups not going to concerts anymore? Or am I just going to the wrong concerts?

  Shelly and I had a great time together. It didn't even matter where we were going or what we were doing, as long as we were together. We were so ridiculously happy!

  But our favorite thing to do was to snuggle up in bed. Every day we looked forward to the evening, so we could go to bed and cuddle. It was like a sleepover with your best friend every single night.

  Well, a sleepover with mindblowing sex.

  She had epic orgasms like clockwork now! We had it down to a science.

  One weekend, there was a New Age convention in town. Since we liked weird stuff, we decided to check it out. Just for the hell of it. The tickets were crazy expensive. I don't remember exactly how much it was, but they were hundreds of dollars, if you attended both days.

  There were over a hundred booths in the convention hall, selling colorful crystals and stones, magnets, self-help and prayer books, blessed objects, potions, rings, and all kinds of other weird and interesting stuff.

  Hundreds of people were walking from booth to booth. The booth owners were trying to talk them into buying whatever they were selling.

  And they also had lectures in different conference rooms. Some were included in the price of the ticket. Some cost extra. Some of them were so expensive, I couldn't believe anyone would pay that.

  We listened to a few of the lectures. One woman said she could channel this alien race, the Arrows. She spazzed around a little, like she had a seizure, and then she changed her voice. She tried to make it sound deeper. And then she pretended to be the captain of the starship of the Arrow aliens. He greeted the earthlings in the audience and said he came in peace, to bring us divine knowledge.

  And nobody in the audience laughed. Not one. Not even a chuckle.

  They were spellbound! Staring and listening, with their mouths open, as if Jesus himself had appeared before them! They honestly believed this bullshit. They were completely wrapped up in the fantasy that this was an alien being speaking to them, who was about to share great wisdom with them. They sat there and were taking notes, and nodded solemnly, like they were earth's diplomatic envoy to the galactic council.

  We went to another lecture. Step right up, step right up, folks! This was a guy who said he was not human but a temporal traveler, without DNA. He said he could step in and out of timelines, like they were different rooms. His name was Jesus, he said.

  Nobody thought that was strange. I'm surprised they didn't ask for his autograph.

  He said he came to warn us that the aliens were feeding off of our pain. And our sins. He told us we must make sure the aliens can't tune into our brainwaves. That's how they find us. So we must become invisible to the aliens by shielding our brainwaves from escaping.


  A-haaa! So that's what the tin foil hats are for!

  In another lecture, an old guy who looked like a professor with big white hair, told us that we need to be grateful to the aliens, because we're poisoning ourselves with all our exhaust fumes. For years the aliens have been hovering over our cities with invisible anti-pollution spaceships, cleaning our air for us.

  You're welcome.

  He said Mars is like the Detroit of the solar system. Mars builds all the invisible spaceships for the aliens on Venus and Jupiter.

  I swear that's what he said! I'm not making this up!

  And nobody laughed.

  They believed this bullshit! They were listening very intently. Like this was the most important information they had ever heard in their lives. Powerful and life-changing stuff. A bunch of people were taking notes here, too.

  Then we went to a lecture by a woman who said she could remember her past lives.

  She said she used to be a young maiden, a couple of hundred years ago, who was abandoned by her parents and left for dead.

  A farmer found her by the side of the road and took her in. He made her live in the barn. She blossomed into a beautiful young girl.

  And every night the farmer came and fucked her in the barn.

  Well, the woman didn't use the word fuck in her past life story. She said he lay with her.

  It sounds fancier. Makes all the difference in the world.

  So the farmer fucked her. And she got pregnant a whole bunch of times. And he always took her baby away and sold it on the market to some baby buyer.

  Finally the farmer's wife found out he was fucking the help, and told him to get rid of the girl.

  So he carried the girl in his arms into the river. Gently. He whispered: "I love you." And then he drowned her until she was dead.

  The end.

  And people in the audience were tearing up, like it was the must beautiful thing they had ever heard. Nobody questioned whether this story was actually true. Of course it was! She said so!

  Oh, that reminds me... You know one of the weirdest things about writing about your life? When people read your book and then say you just made it up. I've had that happen a few times with the last two books. Some idiot reads my book and then says, nope, it's all made up, didn't happen.

  I mean, I know my life wasn't what most people would consider "normal." I realize that my stories must seem pretty colorful to "normal" people.

  Did you detect my passive aggressive insult in the use of the world normal? I did that to be mean, to insult normal people.

  Let's ban the word normal! It's offensive! It's used in a way that comes from a place of hate. Like the N-word.

  Anyway, when someone tells you your life is so crazy, it can't be true, that's when you realize how fucked up your life really was.

  Orrr the guy who said that was a Trump voter who has never been out of his neck of the woods, and has never seen the world or experienced anything interesting in his life. Maybe his life is so boring that my life must seem impossibly colorful and interesting to him by comparison. Maybe his life is a Trabi and my life is a Mercedes.

  I don't know. But yeah, for better or worse, this is the story of my life. I'm a real person and it all really happened.

  Anyway, the lady who said in a past life she was a poor drowned maiden, said after she returned to heaven, she talked to God: "God, why did you let the farmer rape me? Why did you let him take away my nine babies?"

  And God answered: "My child, you asked for this life. I only gave you what you asked me for. Before you were born, you asked to experience pain and loss. To learn about human emotions like grief and sadness. Because we don't have these things here in heaven."

  Did you catch that?

  That was victim blaming at its finest.

  Diabolical manipulation. Ruthless snake oil salesmanship. Trump would be proud of the balls on that one.

  If you get raped and you ask yourself: Why do bad things happen to good people? And why did God not protect me from the rapist although I called out to him in prayer?"

  The answer is pretty simple: There is no God. That's why "thoughts and prayers" don't stop mass shootings either.

  The way I see it, every time a young girl gets raped, it's proof that there is no God. What kind of a God would just twiddle his thumbs and watch, while his daughter gets raped?

  Well, now you know the answer. You were asking for it. So quit yer bitchin'.

  Thanks, psychic past-life lady.

  Next to me sat an old lady with a black hole where her nose should be. Cancer I guess. And she was nodding understandingly and taking notes.

  She finally found her answer.

  Her nose didn't rot off because God hated her, but because she asked him for a black hole in the middle of her face before she was born.

  She just couldn't remember it! Duh!

  Sounds legit. Makes perfect sense. Money well spent.

  She was one satisfied customer. Now she felt better about the black hole in the middle of her face.

  And for only $29.95 you too could feel better about yourself!

  All these fucking charlatans and snake oil salesmen and so-called psychics and faith healers and mediums were selling the same thing: overpriced false hope!

  The people, the customers, were lost souls, desperately trying to buy happiness. There were a lot of bald older women with no eyebrows in the crowd. Terminal cancer patients, who hoped to find a miracle cure among the cheap plastic crap that supposedly had magical healing powers.

  Buy my beaded necklaces! Only $9.95! It'll cure your cancer and your hemorrhoids!

  There were people claiming to have the healing touch. For $50 they'd put their hands on you for a few seconds and claimed that it would heal whatever was wrong with you.

  People were actually standing in line for this bullshit!

  The people saved up God-only-knows how much money to fly to LA, spent hundreds of dollars on admission, and now spent another $50, just so that some con-artist would touch their face for five seconds.

  It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

  There was booth after booth of Tarot card readers and psychics. They were all busy reading fortunes, and each of them had people waiting in line.

  I overheard some of the things these so-called psychics said. It was exactly the same fake bullshit that the phone coach had told Donna and the other housewives to say, when they pretended to be phone psychics.

  Some booth owners claimed to be able to speak directly to God on your behalf. For only $99.95.

  Other booth owners claimed to be God. Yeah, seriously. And an audience with them only set you back $49.95.

  What a bargain!

  And these fucking lowlife snake oil salesmen had lines of customers! Lines! People couldn't throw money at them fast enough! Jesus, Mary and Joseph, how fucking stupid were these people?!

  It was a feeding frenzy. Like a pack of hungry wolves amidst a giant flock of defenseless sheep.

  The sheep were desperate for a tiny glimmer of hope. They were willing to do anything, pay anything, and believe anything.

  And the wolves took advantage of that.

  A long time ago, a lifetime ago, I was one of these sheep.

  I was so desperately lonely and depressed after my divorce from Donna, I fell prey to a couple of wolves in Fort Myers, who knew exactly how to manipulate sheep like me.

  All they had to do was tell me they love me, and I was willing to believe it, desperate to believe it, even if reality proved my beliefs wrong over and over.

  I looked around me in the convention hall, at the poor pathetic sheep, willing to pay any price for the worthless lies of false hope, and I saw myself.

  Or at least who I used to be before I met Shelly.

  I looked at her and kissed her. I told her what was on my mind. And she said: "I know exactly how you feel. I was one of these gullible sheep before I met you, too."

  Then Shelly told me that a few years ago,
when she first became single for the last time, she had been so desperately lonely, she had gone to a psychic who promised to help her find love.

  For a price of course.

  And then, step by step, he milked her. More potent magic is more expensive, of course.

  "I don't even want to know how much money I gave that psychic," she confessed. "Hundreds. Maybe thousands. I lost track. It took me a while before I realized that it wasn't working. I never told anyone. I was too embarrassed."