Head Game
I spent about five hours yesterday with my brother-in-law Jeff at his house. Jeff and I met seventeen years ago in 2005, the year I met my magnificent Kim. Since my relationship with Jeff only exists because of Kim (I’m not sure how, in a country of just under 300 million people at the time, I would have otherwise run into Jeff), let me digress for a moment and tell you how I met Kim.
Since I had separated from my second wife Carol in 2001, I had been dating a woman who lived in L.A. but who had grown up in Connecticut. She was enamored with the West Coast lifestyle and was equally caught up in sports, as a line producer for Fox Sports TV, based in Los Angeles. She had wanted me to move to L.A. and I had sort of half-way tried that for six months, taking a small rental apartment in Studio City while commuting back and forth bicoastally to see my kids and business partners in New York. I didn’t take well to L.A., so I packed up my things and moved back to New York into my condo on 22nd Street. Having at least tried that, I suggested she try New York for a spell. TV sports was not enough of a lucrative or even single coast gig to prevent that, so she tried moving to New York. I even went so far as to buy a new condo that suited her better since it had outdoor space that allowed her to pursue her most non-California habit of smoking like a chimney. That turned out to not suit her and there I was, at age fifty-one, footloose and fancy free again. I was used to being put out with the cat every few years (remember Fred Flintstone and his saber-toothed kitty?), so I soldiered on.
I don’t do well alone and I had too many lives yet to live to allow trouble to find me all alone, so I took some modern-day advice and went on match.com to see what I could see. The medium seemed to suit me since it allowed me to get out ahead of my otherwise brutish looks with my much more suave communication skills. As a guy at work once bluntly told me, “if you could get to know a woman before she had to see you, you might actually get somewhere.” If I wee a dating kinda guy, I could have plied the waters of match.com for years and years. As it was I was only on it for a few days and even then have a raft of stories to tell for a lifetime. The term from Top Gun, a “target-rich environment” would be a good descriptor of my reaction to the site. But leave it to Kim to break through in an unconventional manner. Usually, I did the outreach and drew back an impressively high response rate, but Kim actually reached out to me. In fact, since Match sent me to her as a teaser to lure her back onto the platform (she had recently dropped off since her target zone was apparently less fertile than mine), she reached out to me without me having the benefit of even a picture of her to consider. The universe works in strange ways, but her soul reached out to my temporarily blinded soul and there seemed to be a connection. That is quite a head game when you think about it in the context of an online human shopping mall where people literally swipe left or right based on the briefest of looks.
So, we first met on the curb of 44th and 9th Avenue when I picked her up in my car (the same car I had driven back to New York from my L.A. escapade) as we headed down into Tribeca for dinner. Who picks up a date in a car in New York City, you ask? No one. But I did, and despite being so distracted by her presence that I stopped at a green light and weirded her out for a moment until she asked why I was stopped, we made it to dinner. I stared at Kim throughout dinner and that too was a heavy head game I’m sure, as my explanation that she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen apparently sounded less genuine to her than I meant it to. I could say that it was love at first sight for me and that would not be untrue, but the better description was that she had gotten into my head very quickly and I have spent the last seventeen years only becoming more and more obsessed with her. There is literally not a ten minute segment of my life when I do not think about how wonderful Kim is and how fortunate I am that I drove to Hell’s Kitchen that night to take her to dinner. Finding cosmic and karmic beauty in Hell’s Kitchen is about as much a head game as I can concoct for myself.
Part of loving someone is to love everything they love. Kim has always been about musical theater, and I think it is fair to say that she has made me love musical theater along side her. Kim is VERY close to her family, and it is a small family by most standards. Like me, she has two siblings. At the time we met, that was pretty much the span of her family. Both lived and still live in Southern California. There are two nephews as well, the younger of which worked as a ranger on Catalina Island at the time. Catalina was a convenient and interesting half-way point between where her siblings lived, so we arranged to all meet for the first time out there. It was in a rented condo in Avalon that I first met siblings Sharon and Jeff, nephews Will and Josh, and in-laws Woo and Lisa. After walking uphill to the rented condo on a hot afternoon, I took a swig from a water bottle brought by her clan only to find that it had been filled with vodka to avoid detection by the alcohol police on the ferry boat. Now that was an interesting introduction to Kim’s family and a wake-up head game call of mind-blowing proportions. I imagine I could write an entire treatise on the symbolism of that which could be studied for subtle interpretation for years to come by social scientists and psychologists.
I just went on my iPhone to see if I had pictures dating back to that first family clan gathering on Catalina and find that my iPhone photo album (who the hell knows what may be in the Cloud) only dates back to 2011, six years and one marriage after that gathering and on a trip to California designed by Kim and I to find a home in California where we might eventually move. Lots of strange coincidences there to highlight my unusual relationship with the Eureka state. I guess like panning for gold at Sutter’s Mill, the trick with the finding implied in Eureka, is to differentiate the fool’s gold from the real thing. Kim is the real thing whether California is or not. So here we are on our hilltop in Escondido, which brings me back to brother-in-law Jeff, a resident of Escondido for the past thirty years or so.
Jeff is not well. I will not do what they call an organ recital about him, but he is currently mostly immobilized by pain and a shadow of his former beefy self. Yesterday, to give Lisa, his primary caregiver, a break, Kim took her out to lunch and shopping at the local mall. As a perverse sign of the times, they had to pay to park in the extremely overcrowded mall. The world can be a funny place where malls go from mainstay to abandoned to reborn to pay-to-park crowded in the blink of an eye. So us humans can go from robust to feeling poorly to incapacitated in the next blink. As I shared some self-catered Mexican food with Jeff and watched a college football game (he prefers pro ball and I tend towards no ball), we talked about all that matters at our age, which is life as we know it. He said something very important. When we talked about aging (we are both getting close to 70 with him having an eight month head start) he said he simply doesn’t feel old yet. Here is a guy who could benchpress his own weight and more a few years ago and can now barely get off the sofa to go pee and he doesn’t feel old. There are plenty of days that I feel old and the next time I do, I will think of Jeff and remember that it is all just one big head game and nothing more.