The Choe Show : A Profile of Artist David Choe

I’m Here to Help – The Labor of Gratitude – Unreliable Narrator – The Biggest Lie – (Im)perfect – A Disease of More – Nothing Is Enough – Mass Intimacy – Radicalized Empathy – Narcissistic Altruism – Permission to Change – What To Expect When You’re Accepting – Art vs Happiness – Self Care as Art – Progress Not Perfection – Attraction Not Promotion – Open Honest Direct – The Sicker I Am, The Better The Work Will Be – Permission Impossible – One Day at a Time – In Vulnerability We Are Invulnerable – It Haunts Me

“Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact…” - Thomas Bernhard

“So, who wants to open it up? Who’s willing to share?”

It’s my first time in a church since I was a child.

And while this wasn’t necessarily a religious service, for some, it had just as strong if not more spiritual elements, connotations, and revelations.

Going solely off weather conditions, one would say it was a perfect day.

A faint yellow to the light, diffused in different patches of pink and violet through the large bougainvillea blooming, though barely visible, just outside the basement window from where we’re seated. A refrigerator hums in the corner, its sound dancing in an almost waltz with the buzz of the fluorescent lights above us, each fixture encased in a lattice-like plastic which seems to act solely as a vessel for the trapped moths and other bodies of bugs beneath their bulbs.

My eyes wander all over the room which somehow feels nostalgic although it’s the first time I’ve ever been there. Everywhere feels familiar when you’re with a good friend, something I remind myself. The person who brought me here, David Choe, adjusts himself in the seat next to mine and raises his hand.

“I’m open- to sharing.”

Tammy, the therapist leading our group offers a melancholy “there-there” smile, nodding her head and beckoning Dave to begin.

“Hi, my name’s David-”

“Hi David,” a monotone chorus from the crowd.

“-And I’m… I’m really struggling today-”

Tammy points with a soft assertiveness to the wall, which, amongst other things, has a large sign of labeled feelings tacked up against it, each one with a descriptive face for the feeling or emotion clear enough for a child to make out.

“Oh-” Dave starts over, “to check in: my name is David and I’m feeling good -good is not an emotion- my name is David and today -right now- I’m feeling sad… anger, hurt, shame, guilt, hope, gratitude.”

“Thank you, David. And what would you like to share?” Tammy asks, shifting her weight in the folding chair.

“Well, I’ve always had this belief, this absolute belief that no one believes in me. Even if they say they do, I think they’re lying. I think everyone’s lying. Maybe it’s because I do. But there’s this feeling that I have, that I need to prove to them -to everyone- who I am, what I can do, what I’m worth. And at the same time, I’ve always had this belief that I’m completely worthless, that no matter what it is I’m trying to prove to others, it’s just as much a competition for me against myself.”

He pauses for a bit, sitting with his words before continuing.

“I know that sign says no storytelling, so I’m going to stick to what I’m feeling as much as I can. Living how I have, through decades of deception, I’ve collected and made endless enemies, but the hardest one to deal with has and always will be myself. He’s always there, and no matter what happens, through whatever triumph or trauma, I hear him; I hear them- voices echoing everything I feel about me: that I am worthless, that I’m not good enough, that things should be better, or would be, could be- if I weren’t such a coward, if only I’d done more- always more. ‘You’re so worthless, such a piece of shit.’ And even after years of work and intensive in-patient therapies, years of committing and trying to fill whatever holes of my soul there are- more keep showing up. I feel I’m digging holes just to fill others. These therapists, doctors, psychologists, even my sponsors- they all tell me the same thing: that I give too much away, that I don’t have or ever leave anything for myself- emotionally, spiritually. Yet, I always feel I haven’t given enough, even when I’m broken I have this urge to give more. Even in the children’s hospital, this is years ago, sitting on the floor in tears with this guy* (me; you), days without sleep, I had to give more- I needed to. I had to be strong enough to be there for the people around me. I couldn’t fail them even though it meant failing myself. And those parts of me that need nourishment: I abandon. I recreate the trauma first done to me as a child with myself- I abandon myself every day and I hate it; I hate how much I love hating myself.” He stops, jaw trembling from holding back his tears, his emotions, before letting go.

Others in the room join him, so much so that it’s easier to count who isn’t crying.

Tammy clears her throat and rearranges the oversized scarf she’s wearing from one side of her shoulders to another, lifting her glasses off.

“Thank you for sharing, David. Are you open to feedback?”

“Sure,” he wipes his hands on his lap, “actually, can I give feedback to myself?”

Tammy smiles. The crowd shifts in the humor of his request.

“Well, let’s hear from the group first and we can circle back to that.”

Dave nods to her and the silence in the room.

Eventually, a thin man opposite of Dave raises his hand. His eyes resemble agate, geodes of which are tucked behind a thick bushy granite of eyebrow that runs across the top of his forehead: unbroken in a single line. He purses and sucks on his lips rapidly, a nervous tick he adopts before speaking.

“Hi, I’m Joe.”

Everyone: “Hi Joe.”

“I just wanted. To say how proud. I am of you. How much I appreciate what you said. I really felt it. What you said, it really reminded me of a lot of people. It reminded me of me.”

He speaks like that first time you learned how to drive stick shift: in stops and starts, the sentences and speech nervously excited yet simultaneously unsure in their abrupt beginnings and endings.

He watches me watch him, fascinated by his face. I smile in hopes to break whatever awkward line there is that comes from being seen; we both nod at each other before another person raises their hand.

“Hi, Marie here.”

Everyone: “Hi Marie.”

“I can relate. I… I don’t like myself too much. I really… I don’t like being here- well, I like being here, at this meeting, but being, being here: it’s a tough one… it’s a tough one…”

Everyone nods, staring at the cedar-colored floor, its pockmarked linoleum covered in decades of scars from the seats and feet of countless people speaking their truth to strangers and those strangers seeking that same truth in the floor.

“Thanks for the feedback,” Dave nods, his mouth continuing after quivering from emotion. “‘It’s a tough one, it’s a tough one.’ I really felt that. Look, I’m sure most of you would agree that I’m not an athletic person- just look at me,” he says holding his gut to several smiles emerging amongst the crowd, “but I like to run, from everything I’ve heard, we like to run. My whole life I’ve been running, trying to escape, trying to leave me, doing everything I can to kill myself through living but somehow being rewarded for it- traveling drawing lying laughing fucking failing losing winning and running- the endless running away from myself, from that enemy- from me. ‘My fear makes me fearless.’ He’s always there: when I look in the mirror, it’s only flaws I see; when I wake up, it’s his voice, telling me I’m worthless. I’ve lived for decades without a schedule, without a routine. The only constant has been my fear to lose people, my innate ability to push them away and the never-ending shame, guilt and sadness that comes with hearing and seeing myself. I had a schedule of self-hatred, and it was so easy to learn, because my whole life that was all I ever knew: fuck me. But that fuck me just kept growing and growing until it became a fuck you- to you, to anyone, to everyone- I had to protect myself, I just didn’t want to get hurt, I didn’t want to get hurt again, but I even failed at that. I hurt myself and hurt others.”

His tears interrupt him.

“…I hurt myself so much. And even after all this work, however many rooms like this- I’m still in so much pain.”

He puts his hand on my lap, I reach across with my eyes and hold him with my gaze, gripping his hand in mine.

A few more rounds of feedback and sharing before we’re standing awkwardly together yet separate from the rest of the crowd. That feeling of revealing yourself to someone and for some reason trying to have small talk after, folding up folding chairs and hanging them on the racks by the closet where the priest and choir gowns sway silently from all our movement.

That curious feeling of knowing a stranger’s deepest core struggles and feelings and yet not having had the chance to know them peripherally. Like building a friendship in reverse. I’ll probably never know their favorite food or color, but I seem to know everything they shared about their mother. Some scatter away immediately, while others linger to tell each other how their share or story helped. The thin man with the granite eyebrow and stick shift stutter approaches.

“Thank you- really. You know. Sometimes I feel like people are just here to hear things. And not really share. Maybe they just want the coffee. But your share, everything you said- I feel so much. I always thought I was alone in that. Alone in what I felt. But all it takes is one of these rooms. Yeah, just one of these rooms.”

We struggle to find something less heavy to talk about before eventually dispersing from the room. Dave and I make our way upstairs and walk out into a sunset hitting Sunset Blvd., cars careening down the road, oblivious to anything and everything that just went on.

We sit down in his car, sharing no words -just silence- before both simultaneously interrupting the quietude by reaching over for a hug, as if on cue.

“Thanks man, I really needed that,” Dave offers as he moves different scraps of trash around to find his phone charger.

“It’s weird how easy it is for us to be ourselves in front of strangers. To be that open.”

“These rooms man, all of these anonymous rooms- there’s so much pain in them, but also healing and hearing, a lot of healing and hearing.”

He starts the car.

As we drive away: dusk tinted tendrils of trees billowing in breeze.

I feel a curious longing from him.

“What I said in there,” he says, adjusting the rearview mirror, “what I said has been ongoing, and I know you know this, but I have to say it. You know how fucked-up I was -how lost- but the thing that saved me, the thing that kept me going was friends.”

I put my hand on his shoulder in a way to say everything I can’t voice into words, the two of us taking the time to let our tears fall slowly, silently, the windows rolled down and the dusk air drying our faces in fragments as they catch the wind.

For the last six months* (2018) I’ve been traveling around the country interviewing people about their relationship and experiences with Dave. To collect, what he hopes and describes as, “the worst shit about me- I want to know everything. Let them feel comfortable enough to say anything. I might not want to hear it, but I need to. Any and all my blind-spots, whatever it is that I simply don’t know. The worse, the better.”

When asked why?

“My whole life I’ve lied. I’ve lied to myself; I’ve lied to you. Just since this morning I’ve probably lied to you more times than I can count. I don’t know what the truth is anymore. I’ve had to lie to myself for so long to stay ok, simply as a coping mechanism. When I was sent away as a child, abandoned- I would lie to myself every day that things were ok, I would tell myself: ‘it’s ok, things will be ok.’ Like a mantra. And the lie saved me- it allowed me to survive. But I don’t want to lie anymore, and I don’t want to simply ‘survive’ either. I want to fucking live and be happy and not hurt myself or anyone else anymore. ‘Hurt people hurt people.’ I don’t know how many times I’ve said that, but it’s true. I’ve hurt so many people because I was so hurt myself. And the fucked-up thing is I’ve been rewarded for it each time, for each lie, either in large sums of money from jobs, or just in the simple smiles when telling a story that can get more laughs if this or that were tweaked. I’ve lied to everyone- to you, to my friends, strangers, family, loved ones and most of all I lie to myself each day, either in the hateful things or the positive things I’ll say. It’s like the Transformers, not the shitty Michael Bay movies, but the old toys, cartoons, and comics. I show myself as one thing but I’m actually feeling something else entirely. The villains were called the Decepticons. Sometimes I feel my whole life is a deception simply from the feeling of pain I no longer want to feel or no longer know how not to feel. You live to see yourself die a little each day and grow accustomed to it, you get used to losing yourself, lying to those you care about the most and the person you care about the least- yourself. I’m rambling I know.”

He pauses for a moment, running his right hand through his hair.

“I just want to know the truth. And if I hurt anyone, I need to know. I need to let them know I know. I need to apologize, for them, not me- to make amends.”

How many people have we hurt and simply don’t know? The mind tricks itself so one can go on living.

Eventually I’ll return with interview footage, and while plenty of it was saying how Dave had in one way or another done them wrong, nearly each person would also offer the opposite. Dave was trying to be a martyr. He wanted to be the villain in most situations, yet it turned out simply not to be true. Beyond his lies, most stories turned out to be simple miscommunications or manipulation, with both parties falling into the victim-rescuer-perpetrator roles so often that they were enmeshed in them as a hybrid of each. Through either person’s lens they were the opposite or the same in any situation. The one through-line above it all and in each conversation though: Dave’s generosity, his tenacity and his spirit being one to endure and continue through anything.

A former friend:

“When most of us chose to stop, he continued. He kept going. To be honest, it was annoying to be there with him in those moments. To have someone constantly pushing themselves- pushing you. But I can see what it was now. Looking back, he just wasn’t comfortable standing still, he always had to be going somewhere else, and even upon arriving, thinking of what’s next.”

A former teacher:

“There’s a danger to how he is, to who he is. He’s endured and gone through so much, almost as if in training, that he makes it look easy, the hardships. Others that aspire to his level may choose his path, but they don’t have the training or endurance, so their suffering will be that much more. He makes being alone seem like the biggest party in town. Just as he can make a mural or painting look easy enough to conjure or create -the mark of a skilled artist- he makes suffering through life seem fun, for that’s what he’s had to do to endure. … I’m curious to see how he handles his success, how anyone would of his character, because I truly feel he’s more comfortable when he’s fighting, when things are broken. Usually, people kill themselves to get to where he has, and a part of him probably did, but the curious thing is to see what he does next. Most artists first start off obsessed with work as an escape, as a survival tool- the work distracts them from the pain of reality. Then, they become possessed- the work takes over, they get ‘in a zone’ and create from what Da Vinci described as ‘the ether.’ But take that away- that means and need to survive- what happens to the work, to the person? Is the passion still there when the work no longer has to serve as a survival skill? So many great artists kill themselves trying to reach success, or, after having reached a certain precipice, don’t know what to do after. Like a dog chasing a car that eventually stops, they get pummeled or run over by their own longing for achievement. Monks don’t stay in bliss forever; nirvana is only temporary for them. Once you reach the top of that mountain: do you linger in its shadow, walk back down, or jump into a further unknown abyss?”

Nearly a decade ago:

Dave had chosen the abyss.

One could say trauma happens as history does, in what Alexander Kluge describes as history not happening, but collapsing- into time, spilling into space: the fragmentary firmament which we carry within us, distorted like a worn map that we unreliably draw back upon to experience pleasure, discomfort, pride, pity and/or shame.

The memories come in fragments:

Snatches of speech, imagery emerging as though from a fog, snippets of scenes, sonnets of conversation.

At the time, I had nowhere to go so I could be anywhere. Loneliness became our constant, it’s what we knew and grew comfortable with. So many things I’ve tried to forget to remember, so many others I regret to recall.

I remember the traveling: every day a different city or country, though still under the same sky. Time had little meaning, whether we were running away from ourselves at sunrise or in autumn meant nothing- each day was the same in that it had to be completely different from the one before. Living in a reverse recovery of ‘one-day-at-a-time’ wherein each day was simply spent trying to survive and lie to ourselves that we were having fun, that “no one lived like us,” when really the pain of what we had abandoned in hopes to help our work was what kept us from becoming more than men. I remember the women: so many of them just as damaged as he was, both wanting to find what they had lost and lied to themselves about in the other. I remember the gambling: more money lost and won than I’ll ever hope to see, carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in the form of plastic chips in a tote bag, every other day Dave giving away thousands to whatever strangers were around. “I’m not playing for the money, I’m paying for the pain,” he would say to me one night after losing and lying to me* (the next day I am told he would win it all back again, but who can trust an addict’s truth?). The conversations at sunrise either on the roof of a building or in the back of a car about everything we could never tell another. He was one of the rare and few that understood when I came to them with the idea that I never thought I would be able to live past 30. He telling me, “I know I need help, we all do, but I lie to myself so much, I convince myself that everyone else is sick besides me.” When you live not as though each day were your last, but you crave and want it to be your last, you burn for it to all end, you’re living to die- yet you don’t. Somehow, miraculously you continue, society rewards you and you learn through reinforced behavior that that is what you are, what you must be and should continue to do to thrive and exist- on the knife’s edge of trauma and treatment, living -again- “one day at a time.”

Looking back, something neither of us could ever do before, there are those stinging realizations of how we comforted each other in ways similar to the old axiom of how great artists comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. We were the perfect enablers for each other. Probing deeper: the fear and realization amongst friends, some lost to death or distance, of whether or not we were enjoying his person or his addiction, and how to unravel the two? Were we escaping our own problems to swim in those of others? The attachment that comes from people who have experienced the same pain -together/collectively- is one of the strongest bonds we share as a species for there is no lexicon to truly describe your version of hunger, poverty, pain, abuse- those who know, know. We validated the worst parts of ourselves yet reminded each other of the best parts that were buried within our collective addictions. Perhaps this is how and why we survived- we had each other.

Staring into the abyss of this: that feeling that no matter how much you try to escape who you are or run from what happened and is happening to you, you/it will always be there, surrounded by yourself. Maybe you’ll forget for a moment while running to hop a train, while having a conversation with some stranger who just picked you up hitchhiking, maybe you’ll forget it on a stretch of highway, or in a petty crime or theft, maybe you’ll forget it at the bottom of a bottle, while loving someone you shouldn’t, or leaving someone you should have stayed with- people each have their own ways of escape, but they’re all similar in that pain usually replaces pain. And even after trying to fill the hole while digging another, the original omen always comes back, like a splinter or hangnail of the mind you can’t quite pluck out. Demons.

It took a particular kind of pain to make me realize what was going on. And while I wasn’t present during the events to be described below, I believe the greatest liar I’ve ever known to be telling the truth when he said to me one evening just how he had found out that all Las Vegas casino windows are shatterproof, that, with only the rarest of exceptions, there are no balconies on the strip because of how many and who would jump.

“I tried each of my rooms- the Bellagio, Aria, Palazzo, MGM, Caesars- each day I would wake up in another and run- I’d run as fast as I could to the window in hopes of some kind of escape. And I would fail. I would fail every day. Too much of a coward to do it by any other means.”

That feeling I’ve felt from others and right now was supplying erroneously myself in wanting to help more than trying to understand; mistakenly asking why he would hurt himself when I knew from experience and from what his eyes told me then that it had nothing to do with inflicting any kind of pain, but everything to do with ending the pain one can feel so constantly and consistently throughout each waking moment of every day that there is nothing to do but follow through with what one can only hope will stop it: to stop everything.

A curious thing happens when one is known to be given overnight what had in actuality taken them a lifetime of labor and struggle to get to. Yet, that’s how things were when it was revealed on the front page of The New York Times that Dave was set to become the highest paid living artist due to the fortune* (or fallout?) of Facebook going public.

The building was in Koreatown and required two separate elevator trips for all of us who showed up. “This is what he wants,” a friend from back then who is no longer kept saying, “he wants us all in a room talking about him.”

And that’s what we were doing, along with a counselor’s help, to figure out what can and should be done. Imagine: your closest friend has told you of trying to casually commit suicide and they tell the story so well that you follow along as a spectator rather than the participant you are, it taking a shameful amount of time to realize you can and should do something even though they’re always telling you, “it’s alright, I was just joking.”

All of it -their story, their demeanor- masked with a bravado and rage rarely revealing itself for what it truly was: he felt alone.

At the moment, I’m looking at handwritten words on a wall that feel truer now than ever before: The solidarity of those in solitude- together.

Perhaps I’ll take a point from one William praising the work of another (Gass on Gaddis) who said, “there’s no point in exaggerating what is already horrific.”

Dave’s spiral, his bottom, his bottom’s bottom, and the multiple interventions went just as you think they did- fill in the gaps.

Each one of these stories about someone who reaches any modicum of success only to have it turn itself on them when their addict persona is revealed is the same: struggling person escapes into their work in order to survive, the work “saves them” and makes them a success, the success destroys them as they escape to the comforts of the pain they haven’t been able to process, all the while the work and persona continue to be praised and with it the bad behavior falsely rewarded. Bonus points if the person dies young, for they’ll be hailed as being before their time, a visionary, a genius, a legendary figure.

What about the person who doesn’t succumb to that story though? What about the person who realizes there doesn’t have to be a choice between art and happiness- that the two can coexist? Perhaps a rarer story and one that isn’t too often told because who wants to hear a happy ending? Who wants to know that true change and growth is available to all of us- except that it requires the deepest and hardest work of your life? Most, understandably, would rather hear of the more exciting life of those that burned bright and whose life was extinguished by their own person’s pain rather than those who choose where and when to light their flame.

Dave was so close to falling into the former, and I am grateful each day that he grew into the latter.

To recognize that razor wire that too many cut themselves on: that split between persona & person / reality & story. Similar to his success, his recovery didn’t happen overnight- it took years. Years of close friends and family not giving up on him* (although some did through their own means and needs of self-preservation). But to give more than a gram of credit to anyone else besides him would be false, it would glorify the story of recovery into some false redemption narrative that simply isn’t true. The truth is, he didn’t give up on himself. He put the work in and continues to do so today.

Sure, he came back with some of his less than loved qualities amplified* (narcissistic altruism), but after years of intensive in-patient therapy, and self-admitting himself to other recovery and rehab centers around the country, he was able to break down the persona he thought he had to be and was rewarded for, and instead was able to reveal what he always was to those closest to him: a caring, kind, thoughtful, sensitive, somewhat arrogant, slightly narcissistic, generous and loving person. How demeaning the moniker he had “earned” to be called a bad-boy, which to me will always be deciphered as meaning not quite a man and never good enough.

And after a lifetime of lessons in being less than, after a lifetime of confusing what you want with what you need, after a lifetime of thinking the sicker I am the better the work will be, after a lifetime spent lying to everyone, to himself especially, feeling that people only love you when you’re harming yourself, glorifying instead of trying to heal the hopeless romantic and homeless millionaire he was- he surrendered; he survived.

So what does the world’s highest paid living artist do after recovery, rehab and treatment?

Make art of course; to transmute the simultaneous trauma and joy of being into something for others to make and feel as though it were their own.

Koreatown, Los Angeles.

We’re in Dave’s childhood home which has since been converted into an art studio, and now a film set after he bought a house for his parents in the Los Feliz Hills and moved them in a few years ago.

“How do you think the show’s going?”

“There are days when I feel it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. Then there are other days when I know it’s the best thing I’ll ever make. And then I sit with myself, with those two feelings, and try to step back from the black or white thinking and just ask- does this make me happy? Am I proud of this? So far, there have been more yeses than noes. People need permission to change, permission to grow, to feel, to fail- to have fun. I want this show to give that to people- to everyone working on it and anyone who watches it. We grew up in a culture that suffers silently. My whole childhood I wasn’t allowed to feel things even though I did and do. I’ve always been sensitive and had such a terrible shame around it- around all my feelings. To surrender, to be open- it’s my hope that this show can help others with that. If I can tap into and allow people to feel the vulnerability of those twelve-step rooms, like the one we did in that church- that connection I think is what it’s about. It’s just been difficult and new for me, this way of working. I know how to use sadness and anger as fuel for creativity, but for this I want to come from the opposite side- to create from a place of peace, joy, understanding and openness. Maybe that’s why I feel like I’m failing every day, maybe that’s why I feel like it’s the best thing I’ll ever do. Definitely though, it’s why I’m happy today.”

It’ll be another couple years after this conversation until either of us will see something to be proud of on the show, due in large part to Paco Raterta and his team in the Philippines, but when it happens and reveals itself- it feels almost indescribable, an alchemy of who you were, are, and will be, combined with the mass intimacy that comes with giving away a part of yourself to a conversation with a stranger. That deep labor of gratitude that any creative will know when the work they did, after knowing they put in their best, is matched or exceeded by the efforts of all the other artists working on the project together. As Dave would enthusiastically offer, “We’re like Voltron coming together!”

And while it didn’t seem like that in the beginning with the many false starts and stops of the project, after however many hours of on-set coaching and coaxing a certain openness, lucidity and vulnerability, we see what it was all for and it really had nothing to do with either of us and everything to do with people we’ll likely never meet: the audience.

To extricate them from what they think of as flaws and to challenge them to see each part of their person as unique facets and perfect imperfections that exist nowhere else.

“Special snowflake shit,” as Dave would describe.

“There’s so much I hated about myself until I realized that that’s what makes me who I am. How many movies or shows taught us to hide our feelings? How many told us that our role was to show strength above all emotions and to eliminate any vulnerability? What about all the others that made it seem like you were never going to be good enough simply due to how you looked? Imagine instead a show that shows one how to be free of all that. It shows but doesn’t tell. It gives permission for you to feel and be who you are.”

“So, is it working, is it what you thought and felt it would be?”

Dave eases back into his chair and exhales from each part of his body in a way that I can’t quite place as being one of relaxation or regret.

“You tell me.”

Tuesday. I’m outside Dave’s house for our weekly hike.

It’s one of those glazed days that LA seems to be having more of lately: a combined smog and fog.

I start each walk with a silent intention. Today’s is connecting with the present and not getting caught in the past- we’ll see how long that lasts.

We meander through several streets before eventually reaching the trailhead of where we’re hiking. Our conversation has vacillated between codependence (its positives and negatives), eating disorders and childhood sexual abuse (we’ve both had both), relationships, and family- our own and that which we hope to have with our partners.

Dave’s already a dad, so I ask him: “…what have you learned?”

“To be open. To surrender. It took me years to surrender. The worst was thinking I was open, thinking I had surrendered when I was still judging myself and everyone else. But after finally getting there, to hear the truth, to speak my truth… After a life spent lying, speaking my truth for the first time was the most frightening thing I’d ever done. To speak of things I knew no one wanted to hear- of how fucked up and alone I was, how sad, how angry. Anger is just sadness turn inward, you know? Do people want to hear how much I suffer from mental illness? That I’m a people pleaser, that I suffer from manic depression, bipolar disorder, eating disorders? Do they really want to hear how insecure I am? That I’ve survived deprivation, depression, poverty and abandonment along with all the years of religious and sexual abuse I had as a child? Short answer: no thanks- unless it’s funny. People want to watch the car crash; they don’t want to be in it. But after becoming a parent, you have to be open- to be willing to give rather than give up, to forget about your struggle with the world and with yourself in order to heal and move on. And that’s what these walks, those rooms, my relationships- that’s what they do for me. They let me hear; they let me heal. Hopefully that’s what the show will do for others. All of this -this who we are shit- only matters enough when we’re ready.”

“Who do you think will be the audience for the show, or who do you hope?”

“I really hope everyone can see it, because I really believe it can help people- we’ve already seen what it’s been doing for others who worked on it, you know? For everyone who stares in the mirror and wants to stop hating who they see. For every perfectly imperfect person- everyone, I made it for everyone.” He pauses, “I’m also a narcissist- I made it for me.”

We both laugh.

He continues, “but I truly feel it’s for anyone that’s ever felt alone, hurt or neglected- so basically, yeah, it’s for everyone. Lots of pain in this world. It took me years and however many hundreds of thousands of dollars and hours in therapy to learn that that pain is universal. Everyone has or is going through something- that’s not special. Yet, you make yourself unique with how you process it, how you go through with it. Chinaski* (Bukowski) said it better than me, ‘what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.’”

“I hear you, but to continue with the metaphor, most artists and people in general are pyromaniacs, with a simultaneous love, fear and fascination of the flames of pain that experience brings. How do you not get stuck in it, stuck in your persona or expectations- which I’d say you definitely did for a bit?”

“One day at a time. It’s a sad thing to realize at first, how pain unites us all in some way, but then it becomes a beautiful thing. And maybe this is a blind-spot of mine, maybe-meaning-definitely, but my narcissism has me believing this show is for everyone -truly- because of that pain we all share in some way. Everyone has gone through something- everyone. I’ve been in rooms with some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world and felt their pain the same as mine. It’s harder now because everyone seems to be competing in the trauma Olympics which just minimizes and invalidates other people’s pain so much so that they can’t talk about it. Fuck, I mean Tony* (Anthony Bourdain) killed himself because he couldn’t talk about it. ‘The world’s most interesting man can’t complain- you get to travel and eat and chill- fuck you for complaining!’ So he didn’t- he killed himself instead. You know- we’re both the same, just like him. We don’t know how to ask for help; we don’t know how to receive it either. Enough with this suffering, art versus happiness bullshit- you can have both! The tortured artist is a myth. We don’t have to be beautiful losers. We can be ugly winners. Sorry, I need to check myself, I’m getting preachy and it’s annoying, I know.”

We walk for a bit.

“My mom taught me about shame. She also taught me about shamelessness. After the riots* (LA, 1992), our entire lives were burned to the ground. My mom single handedly brought us back from nothing to being able to send her three crazy kids to Beverly Hills High School. She grinded and worked her ass off more than anyone I’ve ever known. She was shameless in trying to sell shit* (Herbalife) to people, to get anything from someone so she could provide for us, and I carried in those footsteps. I sold my soul and whored myself out to the highest bidders- until I didn’t. Until I said no more, and it was only until I started saying no that people wanted me even more. You see, it’s not about being worthy, but rather, it’s about knowing your worth, and you’re worth everything. You know, I thought I had to lie to survive, because that’s what helped me as a child- I lied to myself every day that things were ok when they weren’t. And that biggest lie has now become my biggest truth, the thing I’m most grateful for.”

“What was it?”

“What- the biggest lie?”

He smiles in a way that only an old friend can.

“I’m a narcissist, what do you think? The biggest lie was the one I told myself…

That I was happy.”

Eventually we reach a stopping point on the trail to savor the view: the Los Angeles skyline, bathed in an opal light that only a cloud of smog could conjure. Staring at the city from a distance, small slivers of silver moving through the arteries of each street, each person in their car listening to or listing something that describes their own or others’ pain or joy, as though we’re all just processing those parts of our person through or with others, barely getting by.

Sitting down, we say I love you to each other in the way where it means everything: I see you, I hear you, I’m here for you.

In silence, I flash to different memories in my mind, my own versions and recollections of events from the multiple decades knowing each other: the first time we met, that moment on the hospital floor after a friend had lost their child, holding each other in Cambodia after learning of the passing of Rosie, different days spent together in casinos all over the world “paying for pain” as he would say, that moment when he showed up for me when no one else would because I’d pushed everyone else away, the phone call from the recovery center, knowing he was recording me but just laughing to myself instead of calling him on it, that summer sunrise wandering through the medina in Fes, that mountain road in Morocco filled with stray dogs along the sides of olive trees draped in fog, laughing hysterically to imagined histories in the Sahara after the desert rains. These, and so many more moments blurred by memory’s recollection. The he he was then when I first met him: brash, obnoxious, generous, sensitive, and loving so much as to a fault. To befriend him then just as now- all over again. Was it Montaigne who said that the best friendships are those that continue to be renewed? Does it matter that now, knowing him all these years, that I feel I’m just barely getting to see him, and to allow him to see me- who we really are? Does it matter at all- these memories and moments I hold with me, jewels of recollection, ciphers of different feelings and emotions to draw back upon in happiness, hope, joy, pain, guilt, or shame? Are we not but particles flung and tossed together- atoms in an ether? Does it matter that at this moment I’m listening to the same music, music you will never hear, that coincidentally I held my mother-in-law to as she passed from this life to another? I remember folding the sheets after they took her body away. Does that matter to this article- do you? There’s a supple subtlety to remembering moments tinged with grief. Why do the sad ones come up just as often if not more so than any others? Do we lie to ourselves in remembering something as feeling happy or hopeful? I remember days sleeping on the street on the other side of the world where no one knew who I was and no one I knew knew where I was- toes going frostbitten from the snow. I remember those moments with just as much joy as I do recalling my future wife walk through a diner door after not having seen her in over a decade. What separates the remembrance of what one had to endure -what one survived- from the joy and privilege of simply recalling happiness?

To return:

We’re on the hike, sitting at Dante’s View in Griffith Park, the LA skyline bathed in an opal smog that only a cloud could conjure.

“You want to try something?” He asks. “It’s something new I’ve been struggling with, but it’s really helped me. Normally I would just do it, but I’m learning to ask.”

“Sure.”

“It’s a self-care high-five- I know, sounds like the most blah thing ever, but just sit with it, try it on.”

“Ok…”

“You say five things about yourself out loud around someone else who won’t judge you.”

…

“I am sensitive, I am sad-”

“Five positive things- self affirmations.”

“Oh- that’s much harder,” we both laugh in recognition of our shared fault.

“I’ll model it,” he says with an eagerness of someone wanting to speak more than listen, pausing to think for a bit.

I sit in my own discomfort of not knowing or being able in that moment to conjure five positive things about myself and yet a multitude of negatives.

“Ok,” he clears his throat, “I am open. I am adaptable. I learn from my mistakes. I am worthy. I am enough.”

“That’s five,” I count them on my hand.

“Fuck- harder than hoping trains or doing push-ups, that’s for sure.”

I laugh in silence with a smile, placing my feet on the dirt, outlining the shadow of a palm tree above us.

“I couldn’t say one nice thing about myself five years ago. I wouldn’t have been able to say one thing,” he contemplates and stares at the skyline, flies above and below us moving in a pattern of shapes and symbols I attempt to decipher.

“Forget all the other stuff I said- this is what the show is about: loving yourself. Learning how. You know, it wasn’t too long ago I’d tell anyone to go fuck themselves. Now, I just want everyone to love themselves. How’s that for a pitch?”

We both laugh.

“I know there’s some narcissistic altruism in me that thinks and feels that what helped me can help others and I force it too much. I know- I’m trying to get better. The only thing I can hope is that after putting my heart and soul into this show instead of just my demons, that if it helps someone -anyone- that they’ll be able to share it with someone else and it can have a life of its own. If I can do that for one person, it’ll be worth it- worth all of this. To help people heal people- heal themselves. To live right-sized and in service. No more of this brooding artist shit.”

He continues with a smile, “It all sounds like a fortune cookie or postcard an older version of me would have thrown in the trash- but that’s who I am today, who I am now, and for the first time I can say I love that person.”

I stare at a blank point in the sky: that palest of pale blues, helicopters far off looking like distant birds.

“Don’t think I forgot,” he abruptly offers.

“Forgot what?”

“I gave you my five- what about you?”

“Five?”

“Give me five positive affirmations- this game is a two-way street, bro-”

I smile at him, reminded for some reason of the time he took and supported a friend of ours on a surprise dentist trip when they couldn’t afford it out of fear of what the outcome would be without having had insurance.

I clear my throat, lean into the discomfort, and give him five: