I didn't quit my job on Monday. Not that I was necessarily planning on quitting. Let's just say that if certain circumstances arose, I was mentally prepared to quit. As it turns out those circumstances did not materialize. In fact things worked out quite differently than I expected. They often do.
All last weekend I was pysching myself up for a confrontation. I spent all day Saturday working on one of the two scripts that I have promised to finish sometime in the next two months. I actually got through the end of the first act by Saturday night and was pretty pleased with myself.
On Sunday I was completely burned out. My back was aching, my brain was fried, my eyes were bleary. I decided to go for a long walk. I had some breakfast at a place on the Strip, stopped in at Radio Shack to buy some gadgets and spent some time in the park working on the crossword puzzle. I needed to recharge my batteries. But all the while I knew I was using up precious time. Time that I could be writing. If only I didn't have that stupid day job. That's why I decided to ask for a month off.
When I took this job, the understanding was that I would be able to take time off to work on my outside interests. I actually did take a week off one year to shoot my short film. But other than that I only take time off to visit my family on the east coast, or spend time with them when they come out here. And even then, it has always been a struggle to arrange the time -- since there is usually at least one crisis brewing at work on any given week. It's kind of a catch-22: you can take the time off if it doesn't conflict with the needs of your department, but there is always a conflict.
But this time I really need it. I have been working on a script with my friend Glen for about two months. We have outlined the whole story and now it's up to me to crank out a draft. Meanwhile there's the producer from Canada who wants to make a movie of October Fury, my friend Peter's book about the Cuban missile crisis. I already wrote a story outline for him and then he was going to pay me to write a screenplay. But he hasn't come up with any money and Peter thinks we need to get a draft out to help him sell the idea. The same night that Peter called and I agreed to write a draft by April, I got another call from Glen who had just pitched our movie idea to a producer who is very interested and really wants to see a draft asap. Oh, and I have this band that has just put out a CD and is rehearsing for gigs and trying to hire a new bass player and sending out promotional material to record companies, radio stations and managers...
I need some time off.
I decided it was time to break the vicious cycle and take a month of unpaid leave. So I went in on Monday ready to do battle. I started off with a meeting with HR, where I explained my situation and reminded them of the original agreement that I would be allowed time to work on outside projects. They replied that as long as my department OK'd it, I could take the time. Then I spoke with Susan, the lawyer who is the kind of second-in-command in my department. She has always been totally sympathetic to my situation, but she doesn't really make the rules. She warned my that the boss and I have often clashed on this issue in the past and not to let my testosterone interfere with my reason. It was good advice.
I stopped in my office where I had a message from HR. It turns out I can't take unpaid leave since I have so much vacation stacked up which I would need to use up first. That changes my strategy somewhat, since I would be responsible for making up the lost "billable" hours that accrued during a vacation as opposed to unpaid leave. We have to bill a certain number of hours each month and even if you are sick or on vacation you still have to reach your goal. Otherwise, as happened to me one year, you may not get your raise. Or worse, you may get fired.
Finally I went into see the boss -- it wasn't until after five that I could get a few minutes with him. I had checked with some other lawyers who had already met with him to get a read on his mood: grumpy but not stormy. I went in with a positive attitude, determined to be diplomatic and reasonable no matter what happened. I took a deep breath and made my case. Then, I waited for the bomb to explode.
But there was no bomb. He was totally cool. He was supportive and reasonable. Basically he wondered why I was even asking him since I was allowed to take off the time if I gave them adequate notice. I reminded him that there are often events on the horizon that I am unaware of and so I wanted to run my plans by him before submitting my request. It occurred to him that we would indeed have a very important motion to file near the end of March, so it might not be a good idea for me to be away for the whole month. Given that I would be responsible for making up the hours I miss, I agreed to a compromise of a two week paid vacation instead of a one month unpaid leave.
I don't like compromise. Seeing as how the very fact that I am here in the first place is a compromise, the idea of compromising on top of that doesn't sit well. I went back to talk to Susan. She convinced me that I had done the right thing. She said "start there" and then see what happens next. I like her, she's very smart, very reasonable and apparently doesn't have this pesky testosterone issue to cloud her judgment. O.K. so now I have two weeks off. That's 16 calendar days! That's more time off than I've had in six years -- not counting jury duty. I'll just have to make the most of it.
If it's not enough, I can always quit my job.
HWD
The holidays were kind of a drag for me this year. Despite all my efforts to eat healthy, get plenty of rest and occasionally exercise, I ended up getting sick for Christmas. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised, since nearly everyone at my office had the flu. But for the past two years I've been pretty good at avoiding whatever's been going around. Finally, it all caught up with me. Christmas Day I woke up with a stomach ache and a fever and I was pretty much out of it for the next week or so. I did crawl in to work between Christmas and New Years to take care of a few "urgent" projects, but that left me exhausted and bedridden for the next long weekend.
As if that wasn't bad enough, I went back to work the next week where the two lawyers I was working with basically coughed in my face all day long. Thanks guys. By Friday I had another sore throat. This had me especially worried because Saturday was the biggest Buzzard's gig ever: our CD release party. We've been putting the final touches on our debut CD for the past several months: mastering, sequencing, creating the cover art, finding a manufacturer to duplicate the CDs, etc. Not to mention rehearsing with our new guitar player and trying to find a new bass player. Now it was time to unleash it on the public. We booked a gig at a local club with plenty of room and even a little counter in the back to sell our "product." I even made up some Buzzards T-shirts and completely redesigned our website to reflect our new lineup and our new CD. Everything was coming together -- except my throat.
By Saturday morning I had a full-on sore throat. I gargled with echinacia and garlic and drank soup and slept all day. By late afternoon I decided I was all better and got ready for the gig. I put on my black jeans, black cowboy shirt and tuxedo jacket, filled up a duffel bag with T-shirts and hauled my gear over to the club. I was actually feeling pretty good by now, especially once I started setting up my equipment. We ran through a couple of songs as a sound check and we sounded great. Everyone was really psyched. When they opened the doors, we had a pretty good-sized crowd. In fact we packed the place. When we kicked into the first number, I felt great.
The show was amazing. Everything went as well as we could have hoped. The music was tight, the audience was awesome and we sold about 30 CDs. And somewhere during the course of the evening, a change occurred. What started out as a gig to hawk some CDs turned into a communal ritual of transformation. The music was flowing from the band to the audience and the energy of the audience was flowing back into the band and infusing the music with a kind of spiritual vibe. I was sick, I hadn't eaten all day, I was sweating gallons, I should have been in bed asleep, but something was keeping me going, making me aware of everything that was happening and allowing me to focus on what I was doing. Perhaps it was the fever. But it felt more like a surge of positive energy generated by the collective electricity of everybody in that room. The lines between the band, the music and the audience were erased and what resulted was a communal experience that elevated all of us to a state of inspired harmony. And all this without drugs.
They wouldn't let us leave the stage. We played all of the songs from the CD plus two new songs, plus one more song that our current bass-player-for-hire hadn't even rehearsed with us before. They gave us a standing ovation and stayed around to talk and buy CDs. It was the beginning of the Year of the Buzzard.
After the gig I met the band at Canter's Deli a for a late night breakfast and then finally dragged myself home and collapsed in bed. I was exhausted, but still wired with energy. It took a while to finally get to sleep. The next day I woke up sick again. I went into work on Monday feeling like I had swallowed a handful of razor blades. I went to the doctor and got some killer antibiotics, even though I am philosophically opposed to them. I went back home and back to bed.
We got a lot of positive feedback from the gig. The band is very psyched and everyone has ideas about what we should do next. We have another gig coming up in a few weeks and we are planning to sell more CDs and shirts there too. And of course we need to find a manager and a record company and book more gigs and learn more songs and find a permanent bass player... But all I could think about was sleeping.
I think this past year I must have burned myself out. My job was pretty stressful. The band went through a bunch of changes. And I wrote another screenplay and have now started working on two more at the same time. I had my yearly evaluation at work the other day and I got the usual comments about lack of prioritizing (I do what I think is important, not what they think is), lack of a sense of "urgency" about the job (I don't care), failure to submit administrative paperwork on time (also don't care), and failure to meet my billable hours requirement (I've been sick for the past three weeks). It occurred to me that this job is making me sick. I told them I'm going to need to take a long break pretty soon. I didn't tell them that it might be a permanent one.
I'm actually starting to feel better now, and I'm really looking forward to this year. One way or another, things are going to change this year. After so much time spent putting energy into the band, we actually have a product we can point to and give people and say "this is what we do." I believe that people will respond to it once they get a chance to hear it. If the concert we gave the other night is any indication, people are going to respond to it in a big way.
If you want, you can check out the website at www.bandofbuzzards.com. There are a couple of links on there will take you to other sites (like MySpace) where we have some full-length samples you can listen to. We have to be ready for anything -- this is the Year of the Buzzard.
HWD
Christmas came early this year in the form of an unexpected gift. Last Saturday I was lying around feeling physically and emotionally drained from a protracted dental procedure I had endured the day before. The phone rang and I decided to let the machine pick up since I lacked sufficient motivation to get up and cross the room to answer it. My message machine chirped on and I heard a voice I haven't heard for about two years, a friend named Peter Huchthausen with whom I have collaborated on two screenplays.
Our first collaboration took place several years ago when I read his book about his experiences in as a Navy Lieutenant in Vietnam and asked him if I could adapt it into a screenplay. He lived on the same small island in Maine as my parents, so I went up to meet with him. He cruised over in his little motorboat and we stood in the driveway and talked about our arrangement. We made a fifty-fifty deal on whatever came out of the screenplay and shook hands. That handshake deal still stands as one of my most valued commitments.
I jumped out of bed and grabbed the phone. Peter was in Paris working on a new book. He'd had a visit from a Canadian producer who wants to make a movie of another of Peter's books. The book, October Fury, reveals the untold story of the role of Russian submarines equipped with nuclear torpedoes menacing American ships during the blockade of Cuba in October of 1962. Peter told me that he had already made a deal for the rights and that he had recommended that I write the screenplay. He said the producer was prepared to offer me $100,000 up front.
I said, "What?"
Now, Peter is a former Naval Intelligence officer who was stationed in Moscow during the cold war. He doesn't usually get his facts wrong. He doesn't ever get his facts wrong. He told me the producer would be sending me an agreement by email.
I said, "Wow."
Then I said, "Thanks, Peter."
He couldn't stay on the phone too long, he just wanted to make sure that I was still at the same email address and was interested in the project.
I said, "Sure."
Then I said, "Thanks, Peter."
After we hung up I went over my notes. Yes, it said "$100,000" and "money up front." Holy shit.
I wasn't sure what to do. I wanted to call everyone I knew. But I didn't. I decided to wait. Instead, I did my laundry. Then I went over to Irv's Burgers to have lunch and work on a crossword puzzle.
On the way over to Irv's, I felt amazing. The post-dental work malaise I'd been suffering from had vanished, along with just about every other care, woe, ache, pain, doubt or fear that had been dragging me down for the past fifteen years. There's this woman I've been kind of hung up on lately who hasn't been too responsive to my attempted romantic incursions. It had been getting me down. No more. Who cares about her? I'm a screenwriter! And my job, which has been sapping my life-forces at an unrelenting pace, leaving me burned-out, disgruntled and humorless. Screw them! I quit! I have $100,000! Hah!
I devoured my grilled chicken sandwich and blazed through my crossword puzzle, basking in the glow of my recent ascension from the ranks of the hopeless loser to the vaunted realm of the working screenwriter. I had made it. My dream had come true.
Then I went home to check my email.
Sure enough, I had received something from the producer Peter told me about. And it had an attachment! That must be the agreement. My ticket to freedom. I read the first few lines of the email and suddenly my precious bubble burst. He wasn't quite prepared to pay any money up front for a screenplay. First, he needed to go convince some big Hollywood studio to pony up some cash. Then he and I would talk about a deal. And he had attached a copy of the treatment he planned to bring with him when he took Hollywood by storm. I took a look at it. There was no way any studio exec was going to fork over any cheddar for a 45 page treatment that began with a list of no fewer than a dozen Russian characters each with a name harder to pronounce than the one before.
This guy didn't know what he was doing. And he didn't have the cash. I was an idiot to think I was going to get $100,000 or even $1000 for writing anything for anyone.
I spent the rest of the day watching TV, trying to summon the energy to go see a movie, but it never came.
The next morning I got another call -- this one from my friend Glen. He works for a hugely successful producer at Sony and has been trying to come up with a project to break out on his own. He's been reading my scripts for a couple of years and a few weeks ago he pitched me an idea. At that point I was willing to say yes to anything. As it turned out his idea was pretty good, and we've been working on an outline for me to write the script. All on "spec" as we say, which means "for free." But it's a cool project and we work together well and this particular morning we were really cooking. We worked out the whole third act and even came up with an ending that we both liked. It was great.
I told Glen the story of the vanishing $100,000 and he just laughed. "I have a dozen stories like that," he said.
But as we talked about it I realized something. Even though I didn't have the money, I still had the feeling that it gave me. I had lost it for a while the night before, but now as I told Glen about how I had been walking on clouds for two hours, I realized that I didn't need the money to feel that way. Because if all of those things that had been bothering me could disappear so quickly and so completely, then they must not have been real in the first place. All I have to do is pretend that I have $100,000 in my pocket and voila -- no more troubles.
It sounds goofy, but it really works. I've been walking around all week with my imaginary $100,000 in my back pocket and it's been working like a charm to ward off negative energy. Besides, if I really want to quit my job, I can. And if this woman doesn't want me, there are thousands of others out there. And a man with an imaginary $100,000 in his pocket is a lot more intriguing than some ordinary schmuck.
I did follow-up with Peter on the actual $100,000 and we are now working out a deal with the producer for writing the screenplay. Assuming he gets financing he will pay me half for writing it and the rest if the screenplay is accepted. I also volunteered to rewrite the treatment to give us a much better shot at actually selling the damn thing. On "spec" of course.
It may never happen. They may choose another writer. It could be a complete waste of time. But I got those two hours of pure joy out of it. And I got my imaginary $100,000. And that, as they say, is priceless.
Happy Xmas
Feliz Chanuka
Ciao, baby
HWD
