MY LIFE AS A RECURRING CHARACTER

Sunny came home with a list of names
She didn't believe in transcendence
"And it's time for a few small repairs", she said
Sunny came home with a vengeance
-- Shawn Colvin

The other day, as I left the New Courthouse where I work in the District Attorney's Office, I was passing the Strand Theater, a handsome venue which stands a block from where I live. I saw on the "coming attractions" that Shawn Colvin is due to appear there in October. Colvin, for those unfamiliar with the name, is a singer-songwriter best known for the song quoted above, "Sunny Came Home," which won her a Grammy in 1998. As I passed the marquee on my way home, I experienced a form of deja vu seldom discussed, which is not so much a feeling that you have been there before, but rather that you have walked through a rift in time and briefly occupy a space in your own distant past.

It was suddenly not 2023 at all, but 2000. Same town. Same Office. Different District Attorney. Old Courthouse, but almost the same location (a block and a half over). My then-boss, Kim, had made a passing remark that the Shawn Colvin concert scheduled at the Strand Theater had been canceled because the people who ran the venue didn't think she was a big enough draw. Being a fan of the afformentioned song, I was extremely annoyed by this, so much so that the memory of my irrtation and disappointment were catloged and shelved somewhere within my mind, laying dormant for 23 years until, by chance or design, my gaze fell upon the marquee. It seemed that I would be getting my chance to hear Colvin sing her signature song after all.

This incident got me thinking about the curiously cyclical nature of life. In 2000, I was a recently single, 27-going-on-28 year-old man, who had just joined the District Attorney's Office from the Probation Department. I lived in a run-down one-bedroom apartment on the corner of Market and Duke Streets, kitty corner from said Old Courthouse, and my commute consisted of crossing those two streets (or just running diagonally through them). I ate my lunches at home, and had already changed, cooked dinner, and begun my first episode of The Simpsons by the time most of my colleagues were home. Regardless of any other activities, I spent an hour at the gym or the track, and often wrote into the evening. On Friday nights I went to happy hour with colleagues, friends or dates, or stayed in and watched boxing. On Saturday mornings I walked down to the Farmer's Market, drank coffee, bought groceries, and chit-chatted with various acquaintances at the food stalls. I had a neat, efficient, disciplined life, and not much changed from week to week.

Twenty years later, I returned to this city, took up employment with the same Office, and live a block from from work on Beaver Street -- next to the Farmer's Market, actually: I still spend my Saturday mornings there, and it hasn't changed (it was founded in 1888). I often pass my old apartment, my old courthouse, and the old theater which changed its name but is otherwise exactly the same as it was in 2000. It often seems to me, as I go about the business of living and working and writing, that not a helluva lot has changed. I've lost hair, I'm starting to show some age in my face, and I make more money (not a lot more, just more). My writing is certainly light-years from where it was back then, when I was struggling hard to find the formula which would allow me to finish literary projects rather than merely start them: but there are times when I feel as if the intervening period, especially the twelve years I spent in Hollywood, did not happen at all, or happened to someone else. Occasionally, when no one is looking, I crank up my IMDB page and have a go at it just to make sure that whole career actually happened, that it wasn't just a dream.

Walking around these streets, especially in the vicinity of the courthouse, reminds me so much of my first few weeks back in harness after I returned here. Twenty years had elapsed since I resigned by supervisory position in the D.A.'s Office, and I expected it would be like returning to high school as a grown man: the sights will be hauntingly familiar, but the faces? All changed. And yet that was not the case. The first day I was back on the job, walking down Market Street in the August heat, what struck me was not shock or bewilderment or surreality, but of utter normalcy. It was as if I had never left. And interestingly enough, my first day orientation was in the Old Courthouse, now painted over and repurposed to serve as an administration building. It was less starting over than picking up where I'd left off. As each day passed, I began to pick out faces which were familiar to me. There was F., a once-blond, now gray defense attorney who still smoked too much. There was L., a former prosecutor I had dated for a year, now a defense attorney herself. There was K., a stenographer I had also dated, still at her keys. There were not a lot of these faces, but there were enough of them that a curious conclusion occurred within my mind, something I'm sure very few people experience in their lives, because unlike me, they move in a linear way and don't loop backwards as I so often have.

I was a recurring character.

Did you ever watch soap operas? Do you watch them now? They are sadly no longer as popular as they used to be. But the few that remain have been on for decades, and one of the singular characteristics they exhibit is how they are forever writing off characters, only to bring them back, write them off, and bring them back again, endlessly, until at last the actor portraying them retires or dies. Take Anthony Geary, for example. He played Luke Spencer on General Hospital from 1978 - 1984; a different character in 1991; Luke again from 1993 - 2015, and made a final performance in 2017, again as Luke. There are many, many actors with similar pedigrees, but as I walked the hallways, heard the old verbiage, drank the old stationhouse coffee and heard the same annoying chimes on the desk phones, I began to realize that I was one of them. I had played a role on a soap opera called County Courthouse from 1997 - 2002, and was now reprising it. Many of my former co-stars had departed for different shows, some had remained, and a few, like me, had come and gone and returned, looking older and wearier, but also a little more surefooted, a little more relaxed, now that they knew the game so intimately, its pluses and minuses, its pitfalls and its hilltops. It is the young, hungry, ambitious actor, after all, who is so impatient, demanding, difficult to work with -- "temperamental" is the way they politely put it in Hollywood -- because he is hungry for success, hungry to be taken seriously, hungry for accolades. He feels contempt for his elders because they are still on soap operas at their age; when he is their age he will surely be a famous movie star, raking in millions and balling supermodels in his mansion in the Hills. This measly soap is not where his career will end, it is where it will begin.

It has taken me many years to recognize what an unlikeable character I really was when I was a young "actor" in my mid-late twenties, making my first appearance in "soaps." I had a fatal combination of middle-class, yougest-child entitlement, whisked in with a generous dosage of collegiate, fratnerity BMOC attitude, and sprinkled with the surefire knowledge that I had immense writing talent and was therefore a burgeoning ARTIST. Having so much sex with so many women only made things worse: a young man certain of his sexual attractiveness and prowess is often insufferably arrogant even in moments of defeat. And I was insufferable. I thought I was better than most people and took some pains to let them know it: at the same time I resented, bitterly, the inevitable hostility this attitude engendered. I do not mean I was only bad: just that I paid very little heed to how I was perceived by others, and made no attempts toward humility, no efforts to soften my edges. I wanted people to deal with me as-is. I wanted to deal with myself as-is. I wasn't interested in self-improvement, only success. Like all young "actors," I was more interested appearances than substance -- in other people, and in myself. So I was a pretty good actor, but I was also a villain, the tragi-comic element being that I did not know I was a villain, rendering all of my grievances sincere.

Well, the character of Miles Watson (played by Miles Watson) has been back on set for three years and counting now, and every day, every week I march to County Courthouse, I wonder about the curiously cyclical nature of life on a soap. I had my slick-haired bad-boy era, my self-indulgent "finding myself" era, and now, as a very middle-aged man, the era of -- what? Who is the character I play now? What role does he fill on the show? That is a deeper question, and one I ask myself on an almost hourly basis. There are times I feel like a flat-out hero, helping confused, anxious, suspicious, wounded, traumatized, often grief-stricken human beings navigate a complex, inefficient, and impersonal system; times I feel as if I am burning off a great karmic debt by placing the needs of everyone else over my own; and there are times I feel like a flat-out fraud, a kind of grinning Happy Face slapped over the same selfish, quick-tempered, salacious-minded Chad I used to be, the difference being now -- pathetically -- that I am not in much of a position to act on most of my villainous impulses. A good guy by default, by force of circumstance rather than choice...like a devil robbed of his horns and tail, but still, as INXS once said, a devil inside.

Who is this character anyway?

Miles, as portrayed by Miles, sometimes looks at the world through his windows and wonders where he will be in five years -- in two years, in six months. Life gets shorter as it goes longer and there are more days behind now than ahead. His acting career is not where he thought it would be, and the arrogance of his youth has come back to haunt him. Miles does not feel sorry for himself, but he does feel urgency: torschlusspanik as the Germans call it, the fear that the gates of life will close before he accomplishes everything he set out to do when he joined this goddamned television show. Sometimes he trembles at the immensity of his own ambitions, and all the accolades and progress he has gathered unto himself seem all the more inadquate when measured against that towering edifice of WHAT HE WANTS TO ACCOMPLISH, WHO HE WANTS TO BE, when all he actually is a recurring character on a goddamned soap.

Now, I suppose it could be argued that when you go home again, you shouldn't be surprised if someone has painted the house and moved all the furniture. Tony Geary probably found the transition from Sunset Gower Studios to Prospect Studios a bit jarring when he became Luke for the second time. Part of him probably died a little inside even as the exciting prospect of work took hold of him, because no doubt he thought he'd be polishing Oscars instead of Emmys by that point in his life. But the important thing, really, was the second chance. The second bite at the apple. Because believe me boy, you don't always get them. It may or may not just be a soap, but while you're there, it's home.

Shawn Colvin comes to the Strand (they call it the Appell now) on October 24, 2023, twenty years after I was first denied the opportunity to see her. And it will be worth the asking price just to hear her sing the lyrics which, even as a know-it-all twentysomething, gave me a curiously haunted feeling:

She says, "Days go by, I don't know why
I'm walking on a wire
I close my eyes and fly out of my mind
Into the fire"
Get the kids and bring a sweater
Dry is good and wind is better
Count the years, you always knew it
Strike a match, go on and do it
"Oh, days go by, I'm hypnotized
I'm walking on a wire
I close my eyes and fly out of my mind
Into the fire"
Oh, light the sky and hold on tight
The world is burning down
She's out there on her own, and she's all right
Sunny came home
Sunny came home
Came home
Home