“Wine maketh merry and a feast is made for laughter, but money answereth all things.”
This thought runs through my mind like a brushfire lately. Due largely but far from entirely from my insurance companies failing to pay money owing to me for “long term care policies” for which I have been paying premiums for about 40 years, I have been running extremely low on money. But I mean really desperately low on cash. Scarily low.
This has happened before, and it was terrifying.
Now it’s terrifying again. I feel as if I am in prison or as if I were in the process of being chased to be put in prison. I had some meaningful assets I could sell last time and then be rescued.
That was fun while it lasted. And there were also the terrifying nights of fear when the studio executive failed to call back.
It was a glorious feeling. I got the good news last time by a text while I was zooming along the freeway. It was like getting a telegram from the governor commuting my death sentence. That was how freeing it was.
Anyway, this time it was a bit of good news from my bank that I had finally gotten a good chunk of my payments. There is still some meaningful long green coming in, I hope. But the hint that the dam has been broken was a spectacularly welcome bit of good news.
It all makes me feels as if the “super power” that money is has finally returned to my life. The power that money is and has been so long absent from my life is now under my roof again.
I have seen it come and I have seen it go. When I first came into my life as a newcomer to Hollywood, things were glorious.
I came into Hollywood as a ward of Megastar powers like Norman Lear and Joan Didion and John Dunne, as a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. With so much Pixie Dust on my shoulders that I would light up the room everywhere I went.
Story ideas for scripts would turn into real live moolah everywhere we went. My first hint that I would like to write a script about anything changed to clanging jolting sounds like a slot machine paying off routinely. The balances in my bank accounts zoomed up, up, and away and never came down.
That was a glorious dream, the Hollywood dream, only it was coming real.
There really was a gleaming Mercedes in my garage. There really was a private dining room for my friends and me at Mister Chow upstairs from the ordinary dining room on Camden Drive. There really was my own swimming pool in my back yard overlooking the lights of “The Valley,” with the sweeping lights of all of California running off into eternity.
That was fun while it lasted. And there were also the terrifying nights of fear when the studio executive failed to call back. And then hell on earth when the studio executive dimpy disappeared.
Time, time, time, see what’s become of me.
Anyway, now a large chunk of me has simply vanished into outer space. And that chunk is called me. And I’m scared.
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