Kid Americana

For the longest time — all the time, every second of it actually — I was told to write about my childhood. I’m not a kidnapping survivor or a world-renowned political activist or even America’s least favorite front desk receptionist. I just moved around a lot. And in writing circles, that sort of thing screams fodder. Blame Jack Kerouac.

California, Montana, Texas, New York — been there, ate that thing, wore that hat. I was “local” to 48 of the 50 states before I was in a training bra. At this point in the story, I’m usually asked if we were army brats. The joke I always make is No, my parents were just really bad at making decisions. It’s not true, but it gets a laugh at dinner parties, and sometimes the laugh is more important than the truth.

This experience of drifting from town to town is a double-edged gun.

One: It made me adept at the art of adaptation. Most people don’t say what they actually want to say. Thoughts are run through a politeness filter, then a language filter, then an ego filter, and by the time the ultra-processed thought finally reaches your ear, the truth is lost. Deducing what people mean when they speak has opened a thousand doors and a million windows. How someone chooses to say something, or what they choose not to say at all, always reveals more than the plain words themselves. This is a wonderful way to experience people. It is also a great way to earn the complimentary, Wow, how did you know that? Because you told me!

People are puzzles, not painted rocks. If you want the full picture, you’ll need to push the pieces around and find where they fit. That’s as close as we come.

Two: It made me perpetually lonely. Throughout my life, there runs a low-grade ache of never really being a part of anything. There is no hometown. No friend who knew me way back when. No colloquialism outside the broader American “ta-da”ness. If we are mosaics of all the people we’ve known and loved before, then my mosaic is scattered across the plains, bath salt beaches, and Buffalo New York. What sort of mural is that?

I have learned to romanticize this feeling of unmoored yearning, but truthfully, a wintertime drive around the ole high-school haunts sounds awfully nice. When Connor and I revisited the sites of childhood photos in a cross-country drive two months ago, we proved that I can go back to the old place, but no one is there.

In smaller news: We never had the Family House. Dad’s in Florida now; mom might be in Europe but she hates the location finder so who actually knows? She could be on a yacht with a gaggle of prime ministers or asleep in Moscow.

Anyway, this is all to say that there is no basement to lodge my childhood keepsakes. I have to cart that crap around. Phooey.

Clearly I have a lot to say on the matter of moving and placelessness. So I finally heeded the advice to write about it.

In the spring of 2025, I was working as an overnight security guard at a luxury condo in West Hollywood. I was fresh out of grad school and working for minimum wage, as god and Gavin Newsom intended. My first shift was on Christmas Eve. While the girls and gays cheers-ed to the incoming year, I watched from my desk, sweating in a jacket I’d been demerited for not wearing properly.

I was living with my mother. Getting hourly emails from Student Aid about my expiring income-driven repayment plan — oops, just kidding, don’t change a thing — that was sent in error, you actually owe us three times more — please ask not what your country can do for you but what you can — Look outside. Black sedan. Big gun. Still confused? I had $49 in my checking account.

A spiritual revelation was not the catalyst for my semi-autobiographical writing. All glory cannot be to god. Or Gavin. No, an email from a “production company” is to blame.

They emailed me — let’s say it was a Tuesday. And let’s say I was editing my LinkedIn bio like it was the missing link. The company — let’s call them Stork Butt Nine — had been tipped off by an "ambassador” on the aforementioned LinkedIn. Some twenty-year-old intern with bangs had viewed my profile and thought I was so darn cute that I must be in possession of a decent low-budget script or two. (I assume this was his thought. I was quite cute in 2025.)

I told them that I did, in fact, have two completed low-budget scripts currently seeking development. Which wasn’t true — I’m more of a blank check girl myself — but sometimes the pursuit of financial stability is more important than the truth. Besides, one of the scripts in mind was about 30% written, and the other was inspired by my own life. They could be finished under the gun, surely.

Also a person I loathe was getting big pitch meetings left/right/center at the time, and my Seabiscuit heart really wanted a win.

They asked for pitch decks. Business people love pitch decks and PowerPoints and the term ROI so, so much. It’s like their bat signal. So I turned off my phone and holed up at the foot of my bed for three days, hunched over my laptop like a skin-walking gremlin. By the end, I had two beautiful pitch-decks and a show bible. Truly some of my best pitching work came out of this session. And I didn’t even have to do cocaine.

I shot the documents over. Stork Butt said, Wow we really love this pilot about the weird, moving child! Can we see a script?

Well. There’s the gun.

I turned off my phone again, hooked up to an IV of grape Ultima, and holed up for seven more days. I lost weight on this venture, not that it showed in any meaningful way. I didn’t stand, blink, or piss. I was running on adrenaline and fluttering hope and fuck you. I had written my thesis from a hospital bed. I could hit this deadline.

And I did. By day six, the script was 31 pages long. I beamed like a new grandmother and allowed myself to put on a fresh pair of pants. I filed a copyright with the WGA1, shot it over to Stork Butt Nine, ate a can of baked beans, and fell asleep on mom’s ottoman.

They loved it. They wanted to make it. We would shoot locally, with a $300,000 budget and an expanded writers’ room. I cried. I imagined calling the best writers I know (a group of girls from grad school) and settling them into a real writers’ room, with walls and rolly chairs. I imagined stocking the mini fridge with kombucha and Coke Zero. Direct deposits getting pumped into my crippled and crying bank account. A premiere on Hulu that my mom and uncle and dad and community theatre enemy could watch.

That night, I slept on a cloud of imagined laughter pouring in from the other room. What a glorious life, I said to myself. And for once, that wasn’t an empty mantra repeated half-heartedly during an ASMR-meditation-tarot-Reiki session. I genuinely believed it.

I woke up. Put on my demerit jacket. Checked my email. They wanted $13,000.