Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets

by Jessica Fox

  A 20-something man in a racing suit, holding a megaphone, stood on one of Intelligentsia’s tables. People started cheering. His words were loud and garbled. Something was about to start.

  “We may lose each other,” the Screenwriter shouted. “But give me a ring at the end of the night and we’ll meet up again.” He turned to go.

  “Wait, what exactly are we doing?” I suddenly panicked. I didn’t want to sound uncool but where the hell were we going? How would I get back home?

  The Screenwriter disappeared into the crowd and the mass of bicycles started moving. Like a metal cloud, hundreds of noise-making, shining, fabulous bikes moved as a herd down West Sunset Boulevard – me with them.

  The city looked different at night, gliding along on a bike. There were so many of us that we cycled along at a perfect cruising speed. This was an LA I never got to see because I was always in the four-walled fortress of my car. I felt as if I was on an urban safari and instead of animals there were wild houses, decaying buildings, graffiti-dressed walls, exotic-looking pedestrians, a high-rise city centre and glowing fast-food signs.

  A man with a thick moustache and a speaker passed me on his bicycle, music pumping. We all cheered. Now our expedition had a soundtrack.

  I hadn’t enjoyed cycling so much since I was a child. Bicycles meant freedom, I had forgotten. I was getting to enjoy parts of the city I would never normally be able to explore, in the safety of a crowd and all powered by my own two feet. The soft breeze was perfect; warm enough not to chill but cool enough to wick away sweat. Night was a time when people would retreat into their caves and here we were, outside. There was a sense of magic to it all.

  A girl my age, rocking knee-high socks from American Apparel and a handmade dress, cycled beside me. She was a photographer called Mini and happened to live near me in Silver Lake.

  “Midnight Ridazz,” she explained, “always brings out hundreds of people. Their aim is to take up a full road lane, you know, to promote cycle awareness and that kind of thing.”

  She asked how I had found out about them and I told her about the Screenwriter and how he had disappeared.

  “Typical…” she said. We made plans to bike home together.

  I met incredible people that evening, from 80-year-old cycle enthusiasts to families out for a good time. Finally, this was the community that I had been seeking in the city.

  It was getting dark now, nearing midnight, and though only half of us were still cycling on, it was still quite a crowd. We turned up a steep hill and I could feel my legs were on the point of exhaustion.

  The young 20-something guy with the megaphone stood in front of a tag artist’s shop, shouting at everyone to come inside. Free spray paint was being given out and we all headed to the back of the shop, where four freestanding concrete walls rose into the air, covered in designs. It was a tag garden.

  Mini found me and handed me a silver can. I had never done this before, and although it was obvious that the walls were built for this purpose, I had a hard time spraying over the beautiful artwork that was already there.

  “This is one of the Midnight Ridazz shops,” Mini coaxed. “It’s okay, really.” She held the gold can up and tagged her initials onto the wall. “See?”

  When you’re tagging, it’s important to find a flow. The paint sprays out of the can in a forceful burst so you have to be ready and confident to make your mark. I decided on the “less thought, more action” approach and started spraying, watching my hand with curiosity to see what it would make. My hand swooped up and down and I drew the symbol for infinity.

  I was pleased. Except, being the inexperienced tagger that I was, I had moved too slowly, so my infinity symbol dripped, streaking the wall with silver lines.

  “Infinity? Typical NASA girl.”

  I turned to see the Screenwriter behind me.

  “Thanks.” I gave him my spray can and walked past him. I didn’t want to be rude. I owed him something, after all, for a wonderful evening, even if it wasn’t spent with him.

  “Where are you going?” He looked confused.

  “Home,” I called over my shoulder.

  I met Mini outside the shop. She didn’t need much convincing to go. We were both tired.

  We hopped on our bikes, joined by some other people from our neighbourhood, and cruised home through the silent streets. Mini waved at me as I turned onto my road, up the hill, calling out that she’d see me at the next one.

  After that night, we never would cross paths again. My velocity, my path, was about to dramatically change direction.

  I crested the hill and saw my flower-covered gate only a couple of yards before me, illuminated by the streetlights. I drank in the night air, and felt a deep sense of satisfaction. With each push on the pedal, I revelled in the power of being completely self-propelled.

  Chapter 3

  “The great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open.” – Herman Melville, MOBY DICK: Fiction section, second shelf on the left in the gallery.

  Two days later, I woke up starving. My stomach rumbled and I was hungry, but craving something beyond food.

  Stumbling over to the kitchen, I flicked the kettle on. My limbs ached with the sweet dull sense of having cycled recently. It was a nice reminder that the past, though past, still existed.

  On Saturday I had worked all day. No fun night out, no getting dressed up. I stayed in my pyjamas ticking off a never-ending “to do” list of articles to write for NASA, website updates and correspondence catch-up. All weekend I had a lingering feeling of dissatisfaction for my cosy little work-centric life and it wasn’t going away. I had tasted adventure on my bicycle and it had awakened a thirst in me for more.

  I flopped into my desk chair, opening up my notebook. It was my morning ritual to meditate by the window with the sun pouring in. I had always felt that filmmakers, just like other artists, needed a time in the day in which to experiment and play. Joseph Campbell wrote in his journal that it was a necessity for every body to have a place or time each day “where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation.”

  This was my time to dream, to write, to doodle and to listen to music, all the while conjuring up images that felt as real to me as the view outside my window. Anything that came to mind I treated as sacred and I would write it down in my book.

  Some sculptors feel that instead of carving their vision into something, they are just uncovering a form that had always existed there. I felt that way about screenwriting. My job was not to carve an image out of words, but rather to act like a scribe as images mysteriously unfolded before me. This type of writing, the mysticism and mystery of it all, kept me interested in the process. Some images wouldn’t lead anywhere, and others held worlds that would open up to me the more I explored them.

  When I got stuck I often found myself turning to Herman Melville. Moby Dick was one of my favourite books and I often pictured Melville, clad in his period garb, sitting on my IKEA sofa, a little bewildered as he suspiciously eyed the green tea I had given him, and wondered how on earth he had got there. He would then passionately yell at me to dig deeper into the bowels of my soul and not rest until I had satisfied my own sense of the beautiful and the mysterious. Melville, to me, represented someone who had had the freedom to let his creative imagination lead him wherever he wanted to go. His writing still held a fresh, exciting tension because he had been brave, inventing sentences, images and story tangents with an intelligent confidence. Whenever I felt lost in my writing, Melville was like a lighthouse, steering me around the rocks of my subconscious self-doubt.

  I poured myself some tea and returned to my note book. My current vision, half finished, stared back at me and I closed my eyes: a girl, wrapped in a wooly jumper sat behind a
long wooden desk in a secondhand-book shop somewhere by the sea in Scotland. She leaned back in her chair, her feet up on the desk, watching the world go by outside her window.

  I could see the bookshop clearly before me: tall wooden shelves filled with a mismatch of beautiful old books. I could smell the shop’s damp, musty perfume. The girl behind the counter huddled deeper into her jumper – it must have been on the cusp of autumn and winter because the steam from her tea swirled in the air in front of her. She was lost in her thoughts, calm and at peace, when a brass bell, which hung above the door, rang clear and interrupted her dreaming.

  I opened my eyes, surprised to see my sun-drenched LA studio still there. The feeling of calm drained quickly away. This same image had been coming back to me off and on for about a year, which was unusual, and more unusual still, the girl in the vision looked unsettlingly like me. I constantly thought about other worlds or characters, but had never had a vision with me in it.

  I sketched a bit more in my notebook. As I drew, a thought flickered briefly in my mind. Perhaps this was not a vision for a screenplay at all. The hairs on my arms stood on end. Perhaps this was a vision about my life. Suddenly, it was as if doors flew open and images started flooding into my mind. I closed my eyes.

  I was on a red bicycle with a basket in front, filled with my lunch.

  I was cycling along a single-track road surrounded by rolling green hills and the sea crashing far below me.

  I was eating my lunch, my own private picnic, with the wind whipping my hair. My eyes looked out over the endless ocean while I pondered the universe.

  I was in a pub. It was night and I was warm, surrounded by fresh faces and the smell of beer. I had to excuse myself, saying it was time for me to write. A chorus of friendly voices called me back but I walked outside, apologising for leaving early.

  Then… then… nothing. Blank screen. As if the reel in my mind had run out of film, the images suddenly came to an end. I opened my eyes and stared at my notebook, surprised. I quickly started scribbling away.

  My phone, like a Mexican jumping bean, buzzed impatiently on the counter. The sound in turn made me jump. With one hand, I flipped it open. It was a text from Rose: “Where the hell are you?”

  I looked at the time. I hadn’t realised it was already so late.

  *

  Rose was a good friend from college – a gorgeous, talented actress who, after a couple of years in LA, had started making small waves for herself. In addition to a string of admirers, and a sweet dog, she had a lovely apartment in the centre of a palm tree-lined street in West Hollywood.

  I had crashed on Rose’s couch for my first two months in LA. It was because of her generosity that I had had such an easy time settling in. She had showed me the city and I had had the time and freedom to acclimatise, with a home and kindred company to come back to.

  Every Sunday Rose and I went to Greenblats for our weekend brunch ritual. Greenblats was one of LA’s finest Jewish delis. We had our usual booth, up the stairs from the main restaurant, huddled into a corner at the far end. The food was better than your grandma could make it; the bagels and lox, divine. The essential part of our weekly ritual, however, was that while stuffing ourselves, Rose and I would dish over our weekend’s adventures. Hers, full of star-filled parties and bizarre dating stories, were far more Hollywoodtastic (as she would say) than my NASA trips or Saturdays filled with paperwork. We entertained each other with glimpses into these different worlds.

  Today, we had started with matzo ball soup, over which I had heard all about Rose’s “quiet night”, a roof party with B-list celebrities where she had landed an invite to the Playboy mansion. By the time we were devouring our usual lox spread, I had told her about my evening at Tate’s birthday, after which she held up her hand, giggling, claiming if I told her any more she’d throw up her food.

  On the bench opposite, Rose tucked her long legs up next to her, sighing and placing a hand on her flat belly.

  “I have a food baby,” she said.

  Bits of lettuce were all that remained on the platter in front of us.

  I looked over our carnage, and still craved something more. Perhaps that deep-felt longing, which had been there since I had woken up that morning, had actually just been for Greenblats’ chocolate cake. While we waited for it to come, I told her about the screenwriter.

  “What a waste of time. You should be happy to be rid of him.” She said, sipping on her diet Coke.

  “Maybe. I think he was playing some kind of hard-to-get game.”

  “Probably.” Rose stretched. “Sounds like a drama queen. Think about it this way, do you really want to spend your pretty on that?”

  I smiled. Rose, in addition to making me feel welcome when I first arrived in Los Angeles, had helped me work through my broken heart. On days when I had felt like never getting out of bed and staying in my pyjamas, she wouldn’t let me. Instead, she took me shopping, to the movies, anywhere to distract me from thoughts of Grant. She, in the kindest way, had whipped me into feeling fabulous again.

  “Always feel fabulous, Jessica,” were Rose’s words. But in her philosophy lay a deep wisdom that went beyond the superficial. When a relationship has lacked the basic capacity to make you feel cared for, cracks appear in your spirit, like fault lines, undermining your foundations and draining joy and energy, leaving you empty. Rose’s solution, showing me that the powers of feeling fabulous lay in my own hands, may sound small, but in truth was profound. It filled me up again.

  “What’s bothering you?” Rose asked, as a massive piece of chocolate cake, smothered in icing, was placed before me. Rose practised what she preached. She always looked radiant, even at Greenblats in just a simple white T-shirt and jeans.

  “Nothing really. I’m just a bit burnt out. I think I’m craving a bit of adventure.”

  Rose nodded. “I know, LA can do that to you. Channel that energy into your screenplays, though. It’s good.”

  “I don’t know. I’m starting to feel that there is something more out there than just film.”

  She looked worried. “Like what?”

  “Well…” I couldn’t believe I was about to say it out loud. “I was thinking, I’ve always wanted to work in a secondhand-book shop by the sea in Scotland.”

  Rose was silent for a moment, then she suddenly broke out in a smile. “You know, I’ve always wanted to work in a flower shop in Amsterdam.”

  “I’m serious, Rose.”

  “I know, so am I.” I thought I knew Rose well but it was the first time she had ever mentioned this to me. She waved her hand in the air as if to dispel the idea. “But that’s just LA burn-out talking. Honestly, you’re building momentum here. You don’t want to lose that by going away. Just look at you.”

  I shrugged.

  “You’re working for NASA,” Rose continued. “You have one film in the festivals, another one getting made, you’ve just finished your website…”

  “I know, I know. Perhaps you’re right.”

  “I am. Anyway,” she continued, “it sounds like you’re already having loads of adventures. Just look at your weekend.”

  It wasn’t the same. I wanted to tell Rose that maybe too often we keep our visions for the page and not as direction for our own lives. I wanted to tell her that if she truly yearned to work in a flower shop in Amsterdam, if she could smell what it would be like to be inside it, if she could see the colour of the tulips in the window, or feel the apron around her waist as she tied the strings at the back, if she could feel the scissors in her hand as she cut the stems of fresh roses, then she should do it. With all her heart she should make her life as rich as her imaging of it.

  Rose flipped open her phone. “Oh my God. It’s already 3pm.” She started putting her credit card out on the table. “How did that happen?”

  “Rose. You got it last time. This one is on me.”

  “You sure?”

  I nodded.

  “All right, lover.” She packed up
her purse and slid her sunglasses on. “Don’t go skipping out of LA on me.”

  *

  The conversation with Rose was still playing in my head, round and round in circles like an aeroplane in a holding pattern, when I pulled out onto Sunset Boulevard. She was right, of course. I had worked hard to establish myself in Los Angeles, and it would be an insane career choice to leave just as things were becoming exciting. She was the voice of reason, reflecting the would-be reaction of my family and friends – all of whom, I knew, had my best intentions at heart. A career move wasn’t the point, however. It was a holiday, a chance to get away from work. A month perhaps? Two, tops?

  Traffic stretched on before me and I looked down at my phone, thinking of who I hadn’t spoken to in a while.

  I called my mom.

  “Jessica, it’s so good to hear from you, sweetie,” Mom said in her happy, lyrical way.

  I sighed. “Thanks, Mom, it’s good to hear your voice.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Jessica.”

  “Nothing. Really. Just. Mom, how would you feel if I went to Scotland to work in a secondhand-book shop?”

  There was a long silence.

  “I’m just saying if.”

  “Fine, as long as you didn’t fall in love with anyone there.”

  “Mom…”

  “I’m serious.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Okay, fine, sure. But otherwise…”

  “Otherwise.” She sighed. She was used to my daydreams, “In the world of the hypothetical, it sounds like fun.”

  Suddenly I was aware that traffic was moving fast and I was back near Silver Lake. Einstein’s theory of relativity could easily be proved when thinking of troubling issues while driving.

  Minutes later, I was back in my studio. On one side of my laptop rested a pile of paperwork I still had to get through before the next morning’s meeting. Although it was now late afternoon, the LA sun poured in with such intense heat that my thighs were stuck with commitment to my leather desk chair.