PING! I was on my way to my favorite place for chai, the café at Good Earth, when I got a call to pick up someone nearby in Mill Valley. A young couple came running down the hill to the house I was in front of, and they said they gave that address because Ubers can never find her actual address. They looked vaguely familiar. She said she was in the throes of moving in with him in Petaluma, and they were both exhausted and taking a break. I congratulated them and asked where they were going now, and they said The Cantina in Mill Valley. I said, “Oh, I know that place. I had a great experience there once that I’m putting in my book about Uber driving.”
There was a brief pause, and then he said, “We know someone who’s writing a book about Uber driving . . . wait. . . is your book called The Joy of Uber Driving?”
I answered, “Yes . . . oh no, are you Steven with the wire guitar art piece?”
They both shouted, “Yes! That was our second date when you picked us up, and we haven’t been back there since. What a coincidence that you are our Uber driver again today!”
I said, “There are no accidents. You guys are very special to me, and now it’s two months later, and you’re moving in together! How great is that? This will be a follow-up piece in my book, but not if I don’t get a hug from you like the last time!” I winked. They didn’t disappoint. It was another wonderful day Uber driving.
Before Handy, it seemed like the whole world was populated by couples, and I was the only exception. So, when we walked down the street or into a grocery store or to a party or a movie holding hands, I felt like I had finally joined the human race. It was no wonder that a year later, he broke off our relationship. Faking it with a sensitive soul such as his was doomed to failure. In retrospect, I was not ready to take responsibility for a real relationship then, but had I been, he might have been the perfect lifelong mate for me. As fate would have it, he found his lifelong mate a few years later.
I needed to learn not to take relationships for granted. They are precious and deserve to be managed with great care and creativity. I also needed to discern between a true hero of a man and a matinee idol type, which I was waiting for as the so-called love of my life.
I’VE GOT TO USE MY IMAGINATION
Musical Pillows and LED Shoes
I was still cleaning houses and doing watercolor portraits, but my creative nature sought other outlets. One time, while standing in line at a police station to pay a traffic ticket, I noticed that a beam of light shining through the trees landed on someone’s shoes. That gave me the idea for LED lights on sneakers. I excitedly made a prototype and applied for a patent pending and then presented it to Adidas. They turned it down, saying they had their own designers and didn’t need any outside ideas. Sure enough, a year later, my idea was copied and manufactured and is still a popular item in kids shoes to this day. I could have handled this a lot better with some expert business and legal help and perhaps the likes of a Shark Tank TV program at the time. Oh well . . . I count my blessings, as my creative juices are forever flowing.
Just a few years before anyone, including me, knew anything about smartphones (which were invented in 1992), my next brainchild was my audio pillow, which was a tubular U-shaped pillow in many styles. I used different fabrics including a soft fleece or polyester satin one for the bedroom to a sporty canvas one for the beach with a shoulder strap and pockets for keys, change, and so on. It doubled as both an audio headset and a neck pillow, with the ends placing the microphones at ear level. I rented a power sewing machine and bought yards and yards of different fabrics and fillings and findings. I researched the best earphones and small radio components and spent countless hours on the machine making my samples. I visited several local factories and got estimates. Even though there were other audio pillows in existence, I received a utilities patent for this model. However, I could not get funding for the manufacturing and distribution of this product after two years of product design and development and promoting unsuccessfully to potential financial backers. Once again, I missed grasping the brass ring, but I chalked this one up as a creatively fulfilling experience. It would have become obsolete with the onset of the smartphone in a few years anyway.
Handy was instrumental in two of my biggest career undertakings: he introduced me to the world of computers, helped me select one, and taught me what I needed to know about it. And he sold me his Canon EOS Elan camera and all his studio equipment as partial payment for a ten-thousand-dollar loan I gave him from my inheritance. He had been an unemployed engineer for two years. He was extremely diligent and responsible in paying off the loan, which tells you what a true and valuable friend he was/is. Others, who had heard of my inheritance and immediately pounced on me for badly needed funds, were not so true and honest. One still owes me twenty thousand dollars. She left town for parts unknown and hasn’t been heard from since. The other, who owed me five thousand dollars, kept coming up with excuses until I just gave up. I am not the litigious kind. Their problems were a lot worse than mine. It’s not my job to seek justice or self-righteous validation at their expense. The universe will deliver whatever justice or lessons they need to learn.
Sometimes I fail to listen to my gut and discern what’s right or true and how to say “no” to what isn’t. Perhaps more importantly, I didn’t have enough self-esteem to simply demand or negotiate a payment plan, which would have given me a clearer path to self-love as well. Handy initiated his own payment plan and stuck to it.
Before selling my condo, I moved back to Laguna Beach into a duplex apartment that I lived in for the following eighteen years. Joy and her son remained in the condo until it was sold. I kept up my commitment to Michael as a devoted godmother for two more years, taking him places he loved, such as Burger King, indoor play centers, a park, or the beach, two or three days a week. At age four and a half he had long blond hair and became a supermodel for some of my favorite black-and-white photos. Being around Michael kept me feeling young at heart while playing an important role in his growth.
PING! It was dark and a thirteen-year-old boy named Jared emerged from the bushes surrounding Scottsdale Pond (a small park in Novato) to signal he was the rider that called. A sweet young man with Pokémon* pins on his cap entered my car, shivering from the cold and partly from fear. He had been alone searching for another Pokémon when a group of three rowdies started following and taunting him, threatening to steal his cap. He said that he’d pretended to call the police when he was really calling Uber. He said this kind of thing happens to him a lot, and he doesn’t understand why. I perceived it was because he was so sweet and innocent. But he also said that he felt protected by unseen forces. While he was calling Uber, he said a police car with flashing lights sped by and the gang freaked out and ran the other way. He hid in the bushes while he was waiting for Uber, just in case they returned. I was impressed with the young man’s composure. He elicited a strong desire for me to protect and mother him but strangely, at the same time, respect him for the adult he was becoming.
*Pokémon GO is a popular game app on smartphones that has players go out of their homes to hunt for and collect virtual creatures in augmented reality.
DREAM WEAVER
Humanimal Rises from the Ashes
I was excited to be back in Laguna, having found a beautiful, large two-bedroom duplex apartment with a whitewater ocean view. I laid down a new carpet and bought bedroom and living room furniture from various antique and secondhand furniture stores in the area, which I refurbished myself. Being two blocks from the beach and a twenty-five-minute walk to downtown Laguna, I was in heaven!
My affair with Handy was over after little more than a year, but our friendship was strong, and he was always available to give me whatever assistance I needed in my new digs. He used his abilities as a handyman and organizer to help pay off the loan. According to the plan, it wouldn’t be paid off for another four or five years, with interest. He was particularly helpful in building my darkroom from a room formerly used as a laundry roo
m. There was a large extra room with an outdoor entrance on the side of the building that we converted into my photo studio.
I studied photography privately from two of Laguna’s best, Robert Hansen and Bill Agee. Digital photography had not come into existence yet, so the darkroom was a major part of the creative process. I fell in love with this process the same as I had done years ago with clay slab work and the ceramic kiln, by spending hours upon hours in the darkroom perfecting my black-and-white images. I was fascinated with the works of Jerry Uelsmann, who superimposed multiple images, creating surreal landscapes. His images were used for the opening credits of the TV series X-Files. I also dabbled in infrared photography, which made leaves on trees white and glowing against black skies. Many years of art photography and professional portrait photography were born at this location with the help and support of my friend Handy.
One day, before moving to Laguna, I witnessed smoke billowing on the other side of the hills that separated Laguna Hills from Laguna Beach. Turning on the TV, I saw what turned out to be the great Laguna fire of 1994, which destroyed over three hundred homes. Later, my morbidly creative mind seized on the prospect of using burned-out homes as artistic backdrops for nude portraits.
I picked for my model Wave, a strikingly handsome guy who was the host at a popular Laguna restaurant. I knew him also from a spiritual workshop he’d facilitated earlier that year. He had beautiful eyes, a full head of wavy shoulder-length hair, a square jaw and straight nose, and a perfect, lithe and lean body. I took nude photos of him huddled in burned-out fireplaces or roaming the crumbled remains of a burned-out house or a barren, ash-filled treescape. In my photos he looked androgynous, and in some photos he looked more like a woman than a man. I called him my “Humanimal.” Together, we made up a story of a humanlike creature born in the sand dunes of Death Valley, as a grown man roaming the world and seeing the destruction of nature by modern man. Deciding to take a trip to Death Valley to explore photographic possibilities, we found an army museum in the desert with World War II tanks. I had him straddling one of them in the nude to show the juxtaposition of a beautiful natural man and a death machine. Death Valley itself did not give me what I wanted for his birth picture.
I was developing a crush on this godlike creature, but unfortunately, he did not have the same feelings for me. I think he was not as connected to his animal side as he was to his spiritual side. Unknowingly to me then, he was a gift in a deeply spiritual way. He had a childlike quality that was very disarming and innocent. Oftentimes, he helped me to key into a bigger picture of what was essential and important as opposed to what was expedient or commercially viable. Meanwhile, I signed up for a photographic trip to the Grand Canyon with my teacher Bob Hansen. I took Wave with me, and we shared a room with a single bed to save money. This was awkward to say the least, since I was hot and he was not.
On the way to the Grand Canyon, we stopped at Fire Canyon near Las Vegas and created some more incredible images. One of my favorite shots was with him buried in the red sand, showing the outline of his stretched-out body from a low angle that elongated his legs. This could easily be his birth shot. Another shot was in the crevice of a cliff and another lying on a boulder like a lizard. He was so easy to photograph because he was completely in tune with my vision. The Grand Canyon itself was not amenable to the kind of shots I was looking for, so we left Hansen’s class and went on our own. We encountered a controlled forest fire nearby. I told him to strip down and run through the smoke-filled forest. This elicited one of my best images. At one point we had to hunker down, hearing the clopping of hoofs from two mounted police passing by on the street near us.
Back home in my studio, I took several shots of him against a white background. At the time, he was babysitting a white python snake, which we brought to the studio in my car. This was a rather freaky experience, as Wave was holding him in the back seat and decided to let him loose enough to slither between the two front seats to greet me. “Geez Louise!” and other less ladylike expletives came out of my mouth. He laughed, but it was all worth it, as we got some very interesting shots. I now had a portfolio of stunning and unique black-and-white nude portraits, which I spent hours perfecting in my darkroom. A local bookstore allowed me to set up a showing with seventeen of these enlarged, matted, glass-framed images. I wanted to create a book of these with the title and a fable called Humanimal, but he had other ideas that conflicted with mine, so my book idea was laid to rest. Perhaps in the future I’ll give it another go.
Later, I went on another class photo adventure in downtown LA, escorted by our own private police officer. We went to the underbelly of LA, where I got some of my most prized black-and-white shots, which I later hand painted and used in many of my superimposed images with Humanimal.
PING! Once in a while someone comes into your life that inadvertently influences you in a profound way. Just such a person entered my car and gave me a smile that lit up the whole interior as though a floodlight had been turned on. He was bubbling over with joy, and I had to ask what happened that made him so happy. Graciously and unexpectedly, he crooned, “I just got picked up by a beautiful woman Uber driver!”
I looked askance at him and said, “You know, I’d take you wherever you wanted to go just as fast if you hadn’t said that. But thank you anyway.”
He flashed his brilliant smile and countered, “I meant it, really!” He sat back and put on his ear plugs connected to his iPhone and started humming while I concentrated on my GPS directions and drove to his destination. I noticed he was scribbling something while humming and then words came tumbling out in rhyme as a song was being born. I knew better than to interrupt his creative flow, but I was really curious who this guy was.
There was something about him that screamed VIP! He was tall and big and had a look that could be defined as happy and at peace with himself, belying years of grief and sadness. I wanted to know more about him, but there was no time left to start a conversation as we approached his destination. Instead he seemed to read my mind and handed me a card announcing an event coming up next month in Marin called Soul Song, with his name, Gary Malkin, as the producer/creator and seven-time Emmy award-winning composer. He then reached into his briefcase and pulled out a CD, which he gave me as a gift. This was the best tip ever! I was grateful for having connected with such a beautiful spirit while Uber driving. The following month, I went to the event and was part of an audience of about two hundred people singing and dancing to rapturous music sometimes sung and played on the piano by Mr. Malkin. After the event, I stood in line to congratulate him. He remembered me and gave me a big bear hug.
In 1996 I was juried into the Festival of Arts with my custom box-framed images of Humanimal, one with him superimposed on railroad tracks in a fetal position, a shot of him as a giant looming over a street of abandoned buildings, and one of his screaming face superimposed within graffiti. All images were hand painted in a surreal way.
I designed and made my booth to look like moldy cracked concrete walls with moss creeping over them, in keeping with my photographic theme. Humanimal and his friend helped me build the booth. I successfully sold many of my pieces and was asked to demonstrate how I’d hand painted my black-and-white images in the demo booth four or five times during the summer show.
With a very high score, I learned, I was juried back in for the following year and had a whole different exhibit with photo sculptures. I created environments out of concrete, within which the photo merged into the space. But this time, I had employed a couple of female nudes as well as Wave. I carelessly forgot to get a release from one of the models, and she sued me for twenty thousand dollars for “defaming her.” Turns out, she was a regular mud wrestler at a local OC bar, and my lawyers brought it down to two thousand dollars as a frivolous lawsuit. I couldn’t believe her disingenuousness, when the images I had of her were beautiful works of art, while she was a sex performer in a bar. I tried to emotionally detach myself, but there were larger co
nsequences: when the word reached the head of the jury committee, I was subsequently juried out for the following year. A couple of the jurors were surprised, because they had given me high scores. However, they said the head of the art festival had made them use pencils that year instead of pens when marking their ballots. Politics was a common occurrence even at the Festival of Arts. Any unresolved anger I had by then was fully expressed as I smashed many of the beautiful pieces I had made with her image and threw them in the trash. Anger does not justify such a stupidly destructive act. . . . I regret it now.
After the 1997 festival debacle, I decided to focus on building a career doing children and family portraits in Laguna. Once again, Handy to the rescue as he helped black out my wall of sliding-glass doors to the patio and convert my living room into a photo studio. My career blossomed and included family portraits on the beach, which was very popular and sought-after. I set up a photo tent at school festivals in Laguna and once at the annual Sawdust Christmas Festival, which increased my customer base each time.
The following years, my business grew as I advertised in schools and at network clubs and created a niche with black-and-white vintage photos of children. I scoured eBay for vintage children’s clothes, furniture, and props and developed a large wardrobe for both boys and girls. About this time, my beloved cat Hercules wandered into my life through the back door and decided to stay. He became a prop in one of my favorite portraits of a young girl in a vintage dress sitting on a child’s wicker couch with him. He was a magnificent ginger-and-white long-haired Maine Coon cat with almond-shaped eyes. I got very attached to this furry being of unconditional love. He was King of the Hood. Everyone on the street knew him and loved him. He brought me gifts of live birds, mice, or lizards every day, which I learned how to capture and then relocate. He was my best friend. When I held him, he would look up at me lovingly and purr and then snuggle under my armpit.
The Joy of Uber Driving Page 15