I Met Tom Sizemore In An Elevator Once...

Want to hear the story? I thought so.

It was May of 2008, and I'd just gotten back together with my girlfriend (we're now married). She was living in big loft in the Easter Columbia building in downtown L.A. and I'd been living there too until we broke up for awhile... why did that happen? Let's save that epic melodrama for when we're in dire need of a telenovela plot to drown with beer and tears.

Anyway, the Eastern is a big, green, Thirties-era building. It's one of those gorgeous, old-L.A.-style joints right out of Chinatown. The lobby looks like it was designed by Salvador Dali if he'd been obsessed with Art Deco.

Anyway again. You need one of those magnetic key-fob things to get in and out of the building and access the elevator... I had forgotten mine... well, no, see I didn't have one anymore because my girlfriend (now my wife) hadn't given me my old one back because at the time her mom wouldn't give it to her.

So I asked the nice but intense lady behind the lobby counter to let me back upstairs. She knew I at least used to live there and since I never made any kind of fuss and was always polite (suspecting that she was some kind of Krav Maga expert or something since she was a little scarily calm), she agreed.

So I'm the elevator and about to hit the 10 button when someone calls, "Hey, wouldja hold that thing, man?" So I do so. Because that's the kind of person I am. I hold elevators for people. I don't just pretend I don't see them and ram the CLOSE DOOR button like many of the fucks who work in my building.

Anyway. A stocky white dude gets in (wearing a bright orange shirt underneath a cream sport coat - don't ask me why I remember this), joined by two sketchy-looking black dudes... I'd been in L.A. long enough by that point to know that these guy might as well have had the words COKE DEALER stamped on their skeevy leather jackets.

The stocky white dude turned out to be Tom Sizemore. He didn't have a fob on him either, so the lady at the reception desk had to let him up.

"You ain't got a fob fucking thing?" Tom Sizemore asked me.

"Well, my girl's mother owns the apartment and she's not too happy that I'm back in her life," I said, trying to sound too stupid or insane or nervous while images of Sizemore in Natural Born Killers ("MICKEY! I'M COMIN' TO GET YA!") or Heat (that scary look he gives that trucker dude in the diner near the beginning when they're planning on killing that long-hair psycho for fucking up the armored car heist), "So I don't have another one yet."

"She took you back, though, right?" Tom Sizemore said to me.

"Yeah. We're good now."

"Well," Tim Sizemore said, "I'm kinda in the same situation. I don't have one because my girl just let me back in, you know?" Then he grinned - that charming, half-mad grin of his and said, "Just be yourself."

Then it was the 8th floor, and they all got out. The black dudes were huddled in the corner of the elevator, perhaps hoping I wouldn't remember their faces. Not too long after that, Tom Sizemore was pinched for possession.

That was how I met Tom Sizemore.

Death Is Not The End

My mother's mother died this past weekend. She was seventy-something, a lifelong drinker, a horrible woman. I'm going to be a pallbearer at her funeral tomorrow, and I was asked if I wanted to say a few "not-mean" words at the church service.

Having already performed this duty at two different funerals, I declined. My brother will read some form of the pleasant eulogy I composed for the occasion:

Jean Moran, was not your typical grandmother. My childhood memories of her do not include home-made apple pies, a cozy kitchen, and treats. No, I grew up around my grandparents' hillside pool, spending holidays with my wide range of Moran cousins at the end of the exclusive cul-de-sac in Moraga. The journey there from my hometown of Rio Vista was always a strange trip for me growing up, a metaphoric and literal jaunt from my little river town to landscaped suburb beyond Lafayette.

Indirectly, Grandma Jean taught me how to be tough. How to survive, by any means necessary. She had an edge to her, and could be abrasive, but she was caring, overall. I'll miss her, but her last days were filled with pain, so I think she's finally at peace now. Would she want the rest of us to be at peace? You knew Jean, you tell me. All I can say is: I love you, Grandma, wherever you are.

Here's the optional content:

Jean Moran was widely despised and I'm sickened to remember that I am related to her. She boycotted my parents' wedding, made my mother's childhood a living hell, and reigned as the drunken matriarch to a spineless, equally drunken Irish fool. I am glad she's dead, and I'm not sorry that I never visited her. Good night, and good luck.

Does that seem cruel? I'm sure it does. I'm sure I don't care much, either way. I hate funerals and don't want one when I'm gone... even if I ultimately leave fonder memories that my grandmother did, there will undoubtedly be those out there who loathed me in life, hate the fact that I'm dead and they can't get to me, and I just don't want to subject my wife to those people. I'm fortunate in many ways, and I love my life and my wife, but I'm still angry.

The funeral will be a disgusting charade, with a parade of people looking morose and pretending that Jean Moran wasn't a hideous person, someone who oversaw her children's abuse at the hands of their father, who saw to it that only a handful of defiant relatives attended my mother and father's wedding (my mom was pregnant with me at the time, her parents didn't approve of my dad, who is a genuine and decent person, etc.), and who only accepted my mom back into her life after I was born. I'm the oldest of her grandkids, and I stopped talking to those people long ago. 

But I'm going. I'll pretend, like the rest of them. But I'm not saying a goddam thing.