My Incredibly Wonderful, Miserable Life

by Adam Nimoy

  Maddy watches them get in their car and drive away.

  “Dad, those guys were just like us.”

  “Yeah, except they weren’t happy like we are when we come out of therapy.”

  “Dad, what do you think of my sandals?” They’re the ones with silver straps.

  “Oh, I love them. They’re so pretty.”

  Then I notice she’s wearing her cutoff jean shorts, the ones that go way up high, and she’s not wearing tights and it’s her skinny white legs and bare feet in sandals and it’s the middle of winter.

  “Maddy, aren’t you cold in those clothes?”

  “No, Dad.”

  “Maddy, I really don’t think those shorts are appropriate in this weather.”

  “Dad, don’t criticize me, I am not in the mood right now,” and she storms off.

  We settle down in Shayna’s office.

  “Your dad left me a message saying you might want to talk to me alone.”

  Maddy just smiles so I feel compelled to chime in.

  “She said she wouldn’t come in at all if I didn’t come in with her.”

  “Well, I’ll keep an eye on the time and maybe the last fifteen minutes we’ll kick your dad out and you and I will have some time alone.”

  Maddy just smiles and Shayna realizes something’s up.

  “In fact, why don’t we kick your dad out now for fifteen minutes and we can go out and get him in the waiting room.”

  I immediately get up and leave.

  I walk back to the waiting room, but the light sucks and some psychotic patient has taken a pair of scissors and literally cut a recent issue of The New Yorker to pieces. So I decide to go to my car and get my book. On my way out, I peek through the blinds to see Maddy because Shayna’s office has floor-to-ceiling windows and there’s a walkway around the office, so you can look in through the Levelors. I can just make out Maddy and her high shorts and skinny legs and silver sandals. I can see her mouth moving and she’s talking a mile a minute. I’m so glad she has the opportunity to get things off her chest. I’m thinking and actually saying to myself right out there on the walkway, “I love that girl.” Sometimes I like to pretend that if I were seeing her for the first time, if I came home from a long, difficult journey and someone pointed her out to me and said she was my daughter, I’d feel so lucky to know that she was mine.

  I get my book and head back to the waiting room where I turn on the overhead light and read. And read. And read. Forty-five minutes later, at the end of the session, they finally come out all smiling and Maddy says, “Dad, you have to pay Shayna.”

  And I’m like, “I’m glad you managed to think of something to talk about.”

  We get back into the car.

  “So what did you talk about?”

  “Oh, stuff like boys and friends and drugs and school.”

  “What kind of drugs?”

  “Coke and crystal meth.”

  “Are you or anyone you know doing that stuff?”

  “No, not really. I’m just curious about it.”

  “You didn’t talk to Shayna about pot?”

  “What about it?”

  “How many times have you done it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  Then we drive up Barrington Avenue past University High, past the gate that I came out of during lunch one spring day in 1974 to move my car, past the spot where the cops stopped me and told me to breathe on them. I tell this to Maddy.

  “Why did they tell you to do that, Dad?”

  “Because I was a long-hair and they wanted to know if I had pot breath. Then I breathed my pot-free breath on them and they let me go.”

  “Did you ever get high at school?”

  “Maddy, believe it or not, I was never, ever high a single day in school during my entire three years at Uni.”

  “That’s smart.”

  “I’m glad you think so, honey. But when I got home, I lit up.”

  “Where were Noni and Poppi?”

  “Poppi was working.”

  “Where was Noni?”

  “She didn’t seem to care as long as I didn’t do it in the house.”

  “So, then, you shouldn’t care about me doing it.”

  “How much are you doing it?”

  Maddy just gives me one of her little sarcastic smiles and turns away. We drive past the intersection of Wilshire and Federal, where, back in June ’74, I managed to get into a head-on collision with an eighty-year-old man who could barely see. No one got hurt, but the guy sitting shotgun was even older and was wearing these dark blinders over his eyes and he stumbled out of the car with a white cane, yelling at me, “I saw the whole damn thing and it was your fault!” I wasn’t much older than Maddy and I’m pretty sure I was stoned at the time. I was driving the ’68 Buick Riviera. Dad was getting rid of it because he now had the maroon Mercedes.

  “Answer me, Maddy, how much are you doing it?

  “Sometimes. Occasionally. It’s like Shayna told you, Dad, everyone’s doing it. Everyone.”

  “Who, Jenna? I know Laura and Alison do it because I busted them at Mom’s art opening.”

  “Dad, they weren’t doing it.”

  “Yeah, right. Whatever. Talk about pot breath. I just want you to be careful.”

  “You can’t say I can’t do it if you did it.”

  “I’m not saying you can’t do it. I’m saying be careful or you’ll wake up thirty years later reaching for the bong in the morning like me, and then it’s off to AA. Because addiction runs in our family and, like Shayna said, it could easily happen to you. I can’t tell you how many girls I’ve heard speak at meetings who became alcoholics and addicts before they were even old enough to take a legal drink.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean these young girls get up and talk about how they ended up strung out on Hollywood Boulevard and all they wanted to do was stick a needle in their arm and get high and they’re so happy that they got into the program and they’ve been sober for three years and these girls are only like nineteen or twenty years old. When you come to a meeting with me, you’ll see.”

  Maddy just sits there and takes it in. I’m hoping I’m having an effect on her. If I can just keep my kids out of rehab. She sits there, thinking. She’s smart. She’s a very good student and I know she’s thinking about this.

  And then she turns to me with her pretty little face.

  “Dad, will you buy me a pipe?”

  * * *

  I’m in the car with Jonah taking him to school. He’s been going to Garrett’s to work with him and Jason on a video presentation they have on the first ten amendments to the Constitution, and they’re going over their project before school starts.

  “How is it working with Garrett and Jason?”

  “It’s good. I mean, they’re kind of nerdy but they get good grades.”

  “And you get along with those guys?”

  “I get along with everyone.”

  He says this in an offhand way, like he doesn’t want to brag but he’s very proud of the fact that he can make friends easily and I’m very proud of this quality in him. Now, if he can just get good grades like the nerds. He’s got a little plastic gorilla in his hands, and the gorilla is holding a machine gun.

  “So what’s with the gorilla and the other toy soldiers and stuff?”

  “We’re using these to show the ten amendments. Like we have Batman slide down a rope into gorilla’s house and gorilla comes out and says, ‘Get out of my house.’ [He makes a machine gun noise.] Then after he shoots Batman, he says, ‘Right to bear arms, motherfucker!!’ ”

  “That’s what you’re putting in your video?”

  “Except for the motherfucker . . .”

  * * *

  When we get to school, I pull over and he gets out of the car.

  “Do you have your lunch?”

  “Got it right here.”

  “Do you need any money?”

  “No, I’m all right.”


  “Good luck on your project. I loves you.”

  “Thanks, Dad. Loves you too.”

  And I kiss him good-bye. When he walks into the schoolyard, he looks back at me and waves. I sit in my car, waving and watching him. He walks on farther and then turns around and we wave to each other again. I still don’t go.

  And just before he’s out of sight, he turns back again to find me still sitting there, and he smiles and waves one last time and then he’s gone.

  THE SOMEBODY GIRL

  I’M ON THE East Coast, helping to chaperone Jonah’s eighth-grade class on their social studies field trip, and I’m unpacking at the hotel wondering what shoes to wear on the streets of Philadelphia tomorrow. It depends on whether it’s going to rain again—more like pour. My roommate, Steve, seems like a very clever guy and he has a pretty girlfriend. They’re also chaperones on this trip. There are ten of us and we’re taking eighty eighth-graders to Philadelphia and Gettysburg and Washington. I thought they’d be sharing a room, Steve and his girlfriend, but I guess not.

  Our hotel is out in the middle of nowhere. The view out the window is to the atrium, where there’s a wedding party in full swing. It’s nine o’clock and the hotel assures us it’ll go only until ten. Loud music and it’s right next to our room. We open our ground-floor window and there’s a table of guests sitting right there, looking at us looking at them.

  Beautiful city, Philadelphia, pouring rain.

  “Excuse me,” I say to our tour guide, who’s perfectly dressed in Colonial attire, including a ponytail. “I think the kids need to take a minute to get their rain gear off the bus because we weren’t ready for this. Otherwise, they’re going to be miserable.”

  He agrees, and we open the bus and the kids get what they need, but we still end up getting soaked.

  I need to find a pen. The one I’m using now to write in my journal isn’t working very well. I need to find a good pen. I need to find out where I am because I know we’re somewhere outside of Philadelphia. Otherwise, I feel like I’m lost. Or better yet, I need to find out who I am because there are some people out there who think I’m a nobody, or, at the very least, that I’m not a Somebody like them. And sometimes, I still wake up in the morning in a panic worrying that I’m not a Somebody and that I’ll never be a Somebody. And if I don’t immediately get up and jog it off, I know the panic will totally consume me. In my recovery, I’m trying very hard to keep things simple, One Day at a Time, as they say. I need to find a good pen.

  “Is your father Leonard Nimoy?” Steve asks as we unpack and get ready for bed. Steve’s not a bad-looking guy now that I take a closer look, although he was a little cold when we first met at LAX. He’s got a bit of a cool look with the black T-shirt and jeans and black-framed glasses. And when he said he thought marriage was overrated, well, he kind of had me there. But when he said he could have a looker in his bed almost any night of the week, well, he kind of lost me there. Even if it’s true.

  It’s just a cheap hotel room, but it’s clean and it’ll do. There’s a crack in the bathroom sink and the bedspreads are gold-colored and stiff.

  “Christina said you’re Leonard Nimoy’s son.”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  It’s one of my clever little stock replies. After forty years of being asked that question, I’ve learned to have these ready. “We’re just good friends, actually” is another one I like to use. It’s a line I stole from Paul McCartney in A Hard Day’s Night. “He’s very clean” is another one of my favorite lines from that movie.

  “I was at his photography exhibit opening at Antoine’s restaurant,” Steve goes on to say as he’s putting his T-shirts and boxers into one of the dresser drawers. “The nude women exhibit.”

  “Oh, yeah, the nude women,” I echo.

  There’s a woman at that opening at Antoine’s restaurant and she’s looking at me. She’s checking me out and she doesn’t mind that I see her doing it so I check her out right back. And she’s pretty, very pretty: the kind of brunette I’d like to be with, the type I could be happy with. The type that I could learn to love, the type I could spend the rest of my life with. As long as she’s not psycho—or dumb. But I know she’s not. Dumb. Because I know who she is: She’s a Somebody, a Somebody Girl. And she’s not too young. In fact, best of all, she has some of the lines of age. But then again, she’s a Somebody and I’m a nobody, or at least some Somebodies I know seem to think I’m a nobody. And sometimes, I find myself believing them. Steve’s a nobody too; otherwise I would have recognized him because there are several Somebodies here.

  Steve pulls back the hotel curtains and the wedding partiers are still sitting at their table looking bored, which is probably why they’re looking at us looking at them. It’s a shitty hotel really, the kind that would sell off the atrium to a wedding party while the other guests pull back their curtains to watch. But what kind of hotel do you expect for eighty eighth-graders and ten chaperones?

  But she’s really just perfect, the Somebody Girl. Pretty but not too pretty, just right really. Beautiful eyes, white jeans, designer sandals. Her husband’s a Somebody too. Maybe they swing. Maybe it’s an open marriage. Or maybe she’s bored. It’s crowded here at Antoine’s, once the place to be, or so Steve tells me, because he knows Antoine and the restaurant used to be the place to go for food and drinks and cocaine.

  I’ve got to get out of here. The Somebody Girl and her Somebody Husband, the nude women hanging on the walls, the room full of Somebodies. The Somebody hosts who are mad at me about something and look at me like I’m a nobody, like they don’t even know who I am or what I’m doing here. I have got to get the hell out of here.

  “Yeah, I was at your dad’s photography opening,” Steve says, looking up at me, now that he’s finished unpacking. “The nude women.”

  “Yeah,” I reply, “the nude women.”

  HOLY HOLLY

  SHE KEEPS WINKING at me at the meetings. She catches my eye from across the room and gives me a look that says, “Come on, baby. It’s going to be good, really good. I promise.”

  Sometimes I just get lonely, so incredibly lonely. And you can’t hold a cyber girl, you can’t hold them and caress them and breathe them in.

  So I finally say, “Okay, let’s go.”

  But then Holly has a day or two of seller’s/buyer’s remorse and is afraid of the intensity of her feelings and gets nervous and wants to back out. And when I give her the space to do it, she quickly recants and invites me over to “hang out.”

  And it was really good, just like she promised. That first night, we wrecked her place. Now I’m over there all the time because I want more—just like an addict.

  Justin comes over to me during the break at the Monday night meeting. “Dude, Holly told me you’re a tiger in the bedroom.”

  “What the fuck? That’s bullshit.”

  “I swear to you. She said you guys have been totally pushing the envelope.”

  “Oh, my God. I gotta put the kibosh on all that. She’s the one pushing the envelope. I’m just trying to keep up. That girl’s ten years younger than me and she’s wearing me out.”

  And then, a few weeks later, we’re in her apartment, heating it up on her olive velour couch. I stand up to take a breather and she follows me. Her cat sits nearby. Holly is bathed in the late afternoon light. Gorgeous body. Soft, white skin. I hold her close and we sway to the music.

  “I know that if I ever relapse I would lose you.”

  This comes out of nowhere.

  “Yes, you would.”

  I echo the sentiment because deep down I know this is never going to last. The physical connection seems so good but I’ve been noticing other issues cropping up that tell me that maybe we’re not meant to be together after all. I’m now seeing the many differences between us and maybe, someday soon, this thing is going to crash and burn. Only now, she’s given me an out, though I hope to God, for her sake, that she doesn’t relapse.

  Tw
o weeks go by. As usual, I’m over at her place wanting more: candles and music and her couch and me hovering over her. And just as it starts to get hot, she starts in.

  “There’s something I think you should know.”

  “What do I need to know at this exact moment? Wait a minute, let me guess. You’re gay.”

  “No.”

  “You’re bi, which I am totally okay with.”

  “No.”

  “You’re seeing somebody else.”

  “No.”

  “You want to see somebody else.”

  “No, Adam.”

  I’m looking in her eyes, those incredible eyes that need to tell me something, something I’ve known since this conversation began. I just didn’t want to say it.

  “You went out.”

  “I went out.”

  “When?”

  “Two weeks ago. The night of the Rose Bowl. I was with my girlfriends and we went to a bar to drink and, oh, Adam, I know it was so stupid to go but what was I supposed to do? I thought I could handle it, but everyone was having so much fun and it looked so good and I know I should have just gone home but I didn’t.”

  “So you drank.”

  “And did some coke—like all night. I was a wreck the next day.”

  I’m up and off of her now, sitting on the couch, staring at the candle. Her legs start to close . . . along with our relationship.

  “Don’t be mad at me, Adam. Don’t pout, it doesn’t suit you.”

  I’m a professional pouter, been doing it most of my life. Note to myself: Need to keep working on not pouting.

  It was during this conversation that she fessed up to the fact that she also went out at Lawrence’s party. Lawrence the lawyer with the beach house and the teenage bedroom with the shag carpet and the stuffed animals that belonged to a total stranger. All that blow in the bathroom—I could smell it.

  And that was my out.

  Maybe she relapsed to push me away. Maybe she set me up with the “If I ever relapse I would lose you” line just to get rid of me. Maybe I should have seen it coming.

  I do enjoy Holly’s laughter and her smarts, and there is rarely a dull moment after she turns off the lights and breaks out the candles. But now I don’t think I’m helping her with her recovery and I’m pretty sure she’s not helping me with mine.