Luke Ford

I write frequently about social status — I feel keenly that I don’t have enough — and people keep asking me what I mean by “social status”. America is supposedly a classless society. What do I mean by terms like “loser”?

Let me tell you from experience:

A loser shows up to Shabbat meals at shul that he can’t pay for.

A loser latches on to people who don’t want to be latched on to.

A loser sends out more friend requests than he receives.

A loser targets high status people for friend requests hoping that a Facebook connection will somehow lift his own status.

A loser gropes women without their permission.

A loser gets thrown out of places.

A loser tries to get close to rabbis knowing that as soon they find out who he is, they will boot him.

A loser can’t find friends his own age because they’re all married with children and mortgages.

A loser joins cults because he longs for acceptance.

A loser gets taken in by pyramid schemes.

A loser watches an hour of pornography a day.

A loser consults a psychic when he loses his acquaintanceship with Dennis Prager.

A loser walks into a crowded room and no one wants to talk to him.

A loser flunks out two days prior to his scheduled graduation because of an inappropriate blog post.

A loser says “Gut Shabbos” to people who say nothing in return and avoid his gaze.

A loser gets a girlfriend and then finds for years that he can think about little else. His life is that empty of human connection. “You don’t have any friends, do you?” she says.

A loser develops a best friend for a few months who then says upon his expulsion from the shul, “Let me tell you about the feeling in this house — I don’t trust you, my wife hates you, my kids fear you.”

Late one Friday afternoon in June 1988, I was 22, I picked up Student of the Year awards in Communications and Political Science (shared) at Sierra Community College.

A couple of hundred people showed up, including my step-mom.

My teachers said nice things about me. My Literature professor Ray Oliva said I was supposed to get the award for English. My Poli-Sci prof Larry Wight said this was a two-year award.

I’d been knocking around the school for three years, simultaneously working construction and radio news at KAHI/KHYL. The past six months, I’d finally gotten serious, and achieved straight As for the first time in my life and been accepted into UCLA to major in Economics.

I was looking forward to university. I had $25,000 in the bank. I had clear direction — I was going to be an economist. Daily journalism was shallow when compared with the depth of academic work, publishing papers and books and lecturing to adoring co-eds.

Only one thing was wrong — I was sick. For the past four months, I had walked around feeling like I had the flu. It only varied in intensity. It was like a case of mono that never went away. Nobody knew what was wrong. Nobody had a diagnosis or a prognosis. Nobody could tell you what to do.

About a year later you’d get the waste paper basket diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and that solved little. There was no known cause and no known cure. Rest seemed to help. Most people got better after a year.

When the ceremony was over, your step-mother wanted photos. She had you stand in front of the fountain.

This is your favorite picture of you.

Whenever you’re frightened, you still clasp yourself in this same way, arms folded across my chest, hands holding on for dear life, the hair “business in the front and party in the back.”

It was almost the Sabbath but you weren’t worried because you were no longer under law, but under grace.

I think your thoughts went as follows: This was supposed to be an evening of triumph for me and I just feel scared. What’s ahead? How can I make it through university weak like this? What went wrong? I drove myself too hard and I cracked up and now I’m the walking wounded.

You knew there would be many triumphs ahead if you could just get on. What you didn’t know was that no matter how many times you were feted, your life would always careen from crisis to crisis. Sexual exploits and media recognition and sterling speeches would ground you temporarily but the attention would fade and you’d be left starving.

You were never very good at the day-to-day work of developing relationships and building community. Instead you preoccupied yourself with the search for such gigantic achievement, such big fame, that it would fill the hole in your soul.

Now you know there is no achievement big enough to fill that hole. No award matters. No cover story. No quantity of women will sate you. There’s no religion high enough and no pornography low enough.

You stood in front of the fountain that evening with the setting sun kissing you goodnight and for all you knew, that’d be all she wrote.

You’d spend much of the next six years in bed, and the two decades after that hobbled. You didn’t know then that you’d never again run marathons. You’d never again pull off 1200 push-ups and 120 pull-ups in 40 minutes.

You had no friends with you that evening. You hadn’t bothered to accumulate any over the past few years. You’d just been very busy. Busy reading and busy working. You’d had no sex, no requited love. At 22, you were still a virgin. You figured good things would come once you had success.

Son, your pain and confusion, your fear and trepidation, they will be with you always. Other people will have friends and spouses and lovers. You will have your keyboard and your evenings in the sun and they will be your solace for your failure to connect normally with others.

Looking at the picture more closely, looking in your eyes, I see that everything that you felt sure of — namely, yourself — is broken. You don’t believe in God and you can no longer believe in yourself. And aside from your parents, who have to, nobody much believes in, is invested in, in you. Sure, they’ll give you awards, but nobody has elected to share your lot in life.

It was hot that evening. You liked standing near the fountain. And as your mother took that photo, you longed for the girl who wasn’t there, the one who nearly passed out from the fumes in your VW Bug whenever it turned a corner, the nice Seventh-Day Adventist girl at Pacific Union College, the one who would go on to marry a Jewish psychiatrist.

With the exception of my best friend, the Lakewood Rav, my favorite poster in Torah Talks over the past two years has been “Garden Fun.”

From her sensitive perceptive remarks and thoughtful little gifts, I could tell she was a woman. Sometimes we chatted privately. She never got sexual with me to my disappointment. Later, she said she was married.

So I kept things on a holy plane. I loved her writing in the chat room and often rhapsodized about how I wanted to marry a woman just like her.

Now I realize that this poster is a male friend of mine on Facebook who I’ve never met. This guy on Facebook often did the same sensitive kind things for me that the chat room poster did but I never thought twice about him because I assumed he had a penis (and I assumed by his understated kindness that he was a Christian) while she was the embodiment of womanhood (who said she was a secular Jew).

Now I still want a woman like this poster, but one without a penis.

I was convinced she was a woman because she was always appropriate, she was never arrogant or showing off, and she was always thoughtful and wise and considerate. What straight guy is like that?

I’m so glad she/he never lured me into cybersex.

Now that I’ve outed my favorite poster, the chat room will turn into a barnyard brawl and no decent woman will come within a mile of it.

Hank Rose emails:

Luke:

If your personality still ruins your chances for love
and contentment, your self deprecating woe is me
shtick is the journalism of the passive agressive
malcontent. It attracts web heads who get off on
witnessing literary accidents of isolated bloggers who
insulate themselves from real life by living through
their media persona when social reality eludes them.

You still have the classic air sign affliction. You live
in your head in a world of ideas, thoughts, words
and lack of action. You ego trades on what fame
you have but you exchanged a X forum of 100%
for a moral audience of 1%. Yet this hasn’t secured
you happiness in middle age, because too much
honesty about who you are alienates you from
those in whose graces you wish to be accepted.

The blessings of wisdom, love and appreciation
for the simple things in life are lost on what loveless
loners cannot grasp. Which is that one cannot live
through idiot boxes, sound bites and printed words
alone. Without human touch and contact, there is no
real living. Only the media babysitting of electronics
and keyboard vanity for actual flesh and blood union.

Cerebral materialist idealism sentiment is not what
gets us into the next world. LOVE IS. You can’t have
physical orgasms or emotional goosebumps with
words. They are your living, not your loving. Stop
being afraid of life and therputing your fears with
your blog. Go out and meet someone without words
getting in the way. For someone who lives by the
word, too much thought and verbiage is the enemy
of action. Air signs need to realize this or go crazy.

There, I just saved you a session with your shrink!

So Sincerely,

The Artist Formerly Blown As
Survivor of Blowbiz

PS Learning to readjust or temper love’s
failures boils down to letting go
of perfectionism in one’s social
dealings. And I stopped being a
perfectionist when my mother left
when I was two. If I wound up in
porn because of it, then my amorous
abilities helped make the transition
from lust to love and real caring
when I lost my dad. It’s funny how
being in touch with your mortality
makes you let go of angst, grow up
and realize`what matters in life.

There were women I could lust after
or talk well with. But they weren’t
ladies I could share my life with. I
found out what I wanted in a woman most
was a good heart combined with a sweet
innocence. Intellectual pursuits tend
to lead to argument and stress. For the
smarter one is, the more one is prone
to depression or trouble. So I picked a
polar opposite happy go lucky female to
compliment my wise ass air sign head case.

I couldn’t have given up porn and wound
up with someone of similar lost innocence.
When opposites attract, a lady with a
childlike innocence will love you for who
you are without judgment. So find your
Eve before she bites into the apple of
knowledge. Instead, be that apple and she
will respect you for teaching her the ways
of the world. And by the time she matures
to a more adult mindset, she will belong
to you and the power of love will supercede
all mutual flaws and human imperfections.

My mother died just before I turned four.

I’ve often wondered why she didn’t leave me a note to read upon turning 18 or upon getting married or upon some momentous occasion in my life.

If she had written something for me then, I imagine it would’ve gone something like this:

I’m sorry I haven’t been here the last 14 years. I’m sorry you got passed around while I was sick. I’m sorry you didn’t grow up normal.

Despite these problems, I know that you’ve grown up with more love and more direction than most people. You’ve been taught about God and what He expects from you. You may be happy or you may be sad, but your obligations to other people don’t change.

You’re a lot like your father. You find it easy to dedicate yourself to your work. Don’t let the thrill of ideas send you riding rough-shod over those not so ideologically inclined.

Do something beautiful for God.

Your loving mother,

Gwen

JANE EMAILS:

Luke,

It sounds like you are going through a rough time.
Please don’t be hard on yourself and torture yourself.
You are good person, very sharp and you don’t know what’s
waiting for you around the corner

As a mother and woman who was very ill, I am saddened
by your unresolved issues with your own mom.

You need to forgive her for what is, in your eyes, her short coming.
She did her best. I can imagine how painful it was for her to leave
her baby. As I wrote you last year, on her behalf… Mothers don’t
leave their children.

Why didn’t she write a note/ letter in a bottle?
Because it would mean giving up the battle and die. She was
fighting to stay. Now days, its more acceptable and known, at her
time it was not.

But I know she wrote you and still does. Not with paper and pen
but tears, blood and unending love. Why can’t you see it? Open
up your heart, It’s all there.

Thanks for the photos. Its unbelievable how much you look alike.
Yet, your face is so manly. YOU ARE HER MASTERPIECE, the
best thing she has ever produced.

It took me many years and training as a therapist to finally
let my Dad go. He died of cancer when I was 2 years old. I kept
speaking with him for many years but also blaming him for abandoning
me. Only after my own illness, I realized that he is REALLY dead. I
needed to have a burial ceremony and let him go. So, I went to the
beach and sent him a flower with a letter attached to it, thanking him
for giving me life and said goodbye. Since then I leave him in peace.
I am not comfortable with the way I treated him by making him a
punching bag for anything wrong In my life. IT WAS NOT HIS FAULT…
He is dead and could not help it! It also freed me of unresolved anger
that kept festering within me and most definitely did not help my heart
condition.

And so, dear friend, I wish you well. It’s not an easy time for you
right now, but there is always tomorrow…

I met Sony exec Jane* at Adat Shalom on a Friday night in the Spring of 1999.

Afterward, our Traveling Shabbat singles group arrived at some apartment where I got to talk to her more.

She was a smart brunette, like Rochelle and like my mom.

On our first date, I took her to A Walk on the Moon.

I laughed. I almost cried. I had a ball. Afterward, in the parking lot of the Beverly Center, we talked about work. I wrote on the other Hollywood. She confessed that she also worked for the dark side — something to do with gambling.

I said the National Film Board of Canada was flying me to Montreal for five days in June. She said she had a relation there. He might tell me where I could go for Shabbos. I must promise not to pervert him.

On our second date, a Sunday night, we went to dinner. Coming back to her place, I kissed her on the lips good night and said by accident, “Gut Shabbos.”

I’m not sure where that came from. She laughed. I was embarrassed.

On her birthday, I gave her a copy of the Nicholas Sparks novel, Message in a Bottle. I didn’t know what an execrable writer Sparks was nor had I read any reviews of the book. Just the notion of a message in a bottle spoke to me, I wasn’t sure why.

Profiles of me were published in Salon and the Los Angeles Times. I forwarded them to Jane. On our third date, she took me to a screening on the lot. It was a dark thriller (Arlington Road) and I hated it and I felt sad that Jane and I seemed disconnected that evening.

When I called her next, she didn’t call me back for a few days.

Early one Shabbos afternoon, she left me a phone message inviting me to go with her to the Hollywood Bowl that evening.

I was gone all day and didn’t get the message until it was too late. The next day, I went out and bought my first cell phone so I’d never again miss such a call.

Frustrated by our misconnections, I didn’t call her back for two weeks. I wanted to show how strong I was.

When we finally talked, the conversation was limp and we never went out again.

Tonight I Google Jane. She married a surgeon. She took her husband’s last name. She has children.

When I look at at her on Facebook, I can still hear her laugh.

This morning’s assignment in writing class is to describe the first story you ever heard.

I can’t think of anything. As I go back in my head, back through the mists of time, I remember my mother. She was frail, sick, dying, shielding me from my sister’s blows (I had broken into her perfume collection and mixed it with toothpaste and shoe polish and smeared it all over the bathroom). Mom was the archetype for women I’d love. The major themes for my writing were formed out of my brief fractured attachment to her.

I suck women dry. I never get enough attention. I don’t connect normally with people. Something went awry early on in my life. I’ve grown up to take all I can get in the moment knowing that the breast will soon run dry, that death was just around the corner.

A few year’s ago, I read my mother’s book, a collection of children’s stories on Christian themes. I sought in vain for a message for my life.

Many years ago, I asked my father, or was it my step-mother, no, I don’t think I asked anyone, just thought, why did mom not leave me a letter? A message in a bottle?