Clock With No Hands

"You ever been to the Bowl before?" my boy whispers.

I tell him that it's my first time. He smiles.

"Good, because you'll never get seats this close again," he says.

There are four of us in a seasonal box used by the parents of a friend of his.

The Hollywood Bowl, one of the most famous performance venues in LA, is an outdoor ampitheater equipped to hold several thousand people. Celebrities and VIPs are everywhere. I even peep Jonathan Frakes (the director and Commander Riker from Star Trek) The program is a musical tribute to 50 years of Bossa Nova. Songs are sung in English and Portuguese, performed and played by men and women. I don't know how much the seats. The important thing is that they came valet parking and we all rolled in in t-shirts and jeans, save for Nicolina, my homeboy's Italian neighbor who dressed for the occasion a bit more.

"Welcome to LA," my boy says a beat later. In our language this about us doing it one more time, ending up somewhere that we shouldn't be despite the odds against it. It's what we've always done, no matter where we were and what we were up against.

The concert is the perfect ending to a good day. Down to my last few dollars until an airdrop, I still managed to have drinks at the Four Seasons, have coffee and croissants and cross paths with Woody Allen and Dennis Farina all within less than eight hours. I think the thing that's been so hard for us is that we've always been so close to success, that we have a million stories of close encounters, and have even managed to touch the sky for a little bit ourselves. And it felt so out of this world that we thought that we were done. Fall back to the earth filled us each with a different kind of crippling feeling. As Nick Tosches once said, we had finally been dealt our humbling blows. And they hurt us all in different ways.

As I sat at the hotel bar earlier today, I tried to explain to someone about how I had failed to achieve my goals. He explained that I was in no way a failure, that it just wasn't my time yet. I spent my first decade as an adult racing for a pair of closing doors that weren't meant for me to pass through. Since then I've been waiting for my car to arrive.

As the music played, I sipped on wine from Trader Joes and munched on pre-made sushi. It wasn't lobster and shrimp but life rarely is. As the music enveloped me and musicians who had played together on and off for a lifetime shared a stage, I smiled at the fact that as a crew our song has yet to be written.

"Nah man," I whispered back to him. "We'll be here again. I'm sure of it."

Out.