M! True Hollywood Stories: Ryan Michelle Bathe

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I have a silent partner in this blog who is something of a slave driver and gives me tough assignments to write about things I don’t always want to write about. I found myself pleading to my employer today, “You can’t make me write THIS!”. But I’ve been told I’d better. Which reminds me to point out to my boss that I am UNDERPAID.  Don’t worry, Sterling and Ryan. This will only hurt me....

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I first met Ryan Michelle Bathe in the fall of 1994 when we were both freshmen at Stanford. I don’t know if it was actually the first time we met or interacted, but the first time I remember her, we were sitting in the dorm room of our RA Rob Gitin with a group of maybe eight or ten people having kind of get-acquainted session. Ryan looked at me and said, “You have beautiful eyes.”. I’ve heard this thousands of times in my life and I always feel weird about it. I don’t know what if anything it actually means when a girl decides to tell me that (lately, guys have been telling me a lot too). I also feel weird about it because it’s not like its an accomplishment. My dad had green eyes, so I was born this way.  

So while of course it’s always nice to be complimented, and it’s nice to know you have a feature people like, especially when you are generally insecure about your appearance like I am, it usually makes me feel awkward and I don’t know anything to say except “Thank you”. Maybe that’s all I’m supposed to say. I always wonder if that’s the female version of a pick-up line when a girl says that to me, but I have no idea what my follow-up should be if she doesn’t make conversation beyond that. 

But Ryan was one of the rare times it didn’t make me feel awkward, because she did it in a way that no other girl ever did. She said it rather loudly, at a time when no one else was talking, almost as if she was announcing it to the room as much as telling me. And she did go on talking to me. I don’t remember at all what she said because I melted. I mean, as a rule, smoking hot girls don’t walk around handing out those types of compliments to men. They are waiting to be on the receiving end of them. Ryan was obviously and immediately different. 

As it turned out, Ryan lived in the dorm room next to mine, separated by the hallway we called Crossroads which was a kind of social gathering place, not just for our dorm but for the Stanford Black community as a whole. 

One of the first things I noticed about Ryan was that she was the best-dressed girl I ever met. She still holds that title. I’ve probably seen her on three or four hundred days. I LIVED next to her for a school year, and I’ve never seen her not well-dressed. Never-not-once. 

We had the same model of cordless telephone and she used to get mad at me when I’d try to make a call while she was on the phone, and we could all hear each other. I could have gone to Target and bought a new phone, but silly sentimental dork that I am, I liked having the same kind of phone she had, so I just stopped making calls unless I knew she wasn’t home. One of my guy friends said, “Ryan is enchanting.”. I was enchanted. Just about everybody was. 

But back then, Ryan could be an  incredibly frustrating person in certain situations. She’s got a lot of that Natalie Portman-Taylor Swift thing where she’s so smart, she can run circles around most people, and boy, does she like attention. Ryan in a crowded room was about the most infuriating thing ever. But Ryan one-on-one or in a very small group was like the greatest thing ever. She was just like what Gwyneth Paltrow says about Dickie Greenleaf in the Talented Mr. Ripley. When you had her attention, it was like the sun was shining on you and it felt so wonderful. But when you lost her attention and she turned to go, it was like the sun had burned out, and it was so cold.

Ryan was one of the few girls who was regularly quoted amongst guys. We laughed for literally over a decade about her statement that one Black university official was “sophisticated in a 1970s Jet Magazine sort of way.”. If you’re White and/or young, you may not know what Jet Magazine is, but trust me, that’s really really funny. 

Much of Ryan’s sometimes frustrating social persona, I attributed to the fact that she wanted to be an actress. I’d met lots of aspiring actresses in the past and just about all of them annoyed me. I didn’t take any of them seriously. My thought was usually, “Sure, that girl’s smoking hot, but you’ll never find out who she really is.”. But I separated the “aspiring” actress from the professional actress since there are so many people who think they want that job, and walk around saying so, but have no idea how hard it is or what it actually entails. 

But Ryan was never fake or phony like I perceived a lot of other wannabe actresses to be. Ryan was always talking about IDEAS. In fact, it was a regular occurrence that she would say or do something so bold that I would find myself thinking, “Wow, I can’t believe she had the guts to say/do that!”. I think it was just a certain frustration that us boys felt that there wasn’t enough of her attention to go around. And that made her seem at times like the social butterfly type, but she really wasn’t that. Ryan Michelle Bathe is REAL.  And she is also really smoking hot. 

People think I don’t like Black girls. My issues with Black women are based more on a cultural disconnect than in appearance, but this didn’t apply at Stanford. Oh...My...GOD, there were so many SMOKING hot Black girls at Stanford in the mid-to-late 90s! What’d Kanye say? Fucking ridiculous!  These girls are all in their 40s now, but I noticed while looking at Stanford reunion propaganda on Facebook before I quit it that some of them, like Ryan, are smoking hotter now than they were back then (Hi, Channon Dade!). Around campus, students used to say that the Stanford admissions office had a bias against letting attractive White girls in. I don’t know if this was true, but there was actually only one White girl I ever looked at twice in all my time at Stanford, Emma Wollschlager Schwartz, who is one of the smoking hottest girls of all time and one of the nicest people in the world too. Man, I loved that girl. Ordinarily, I’d say a Jewish guy who marries non-Jewish must be crazy, but in Emma’s case, it’s understandable. 

Stanford had this awesomely cool event called Flicks. Every Sunday night, they showed a movie in an auditorium on campus. It costs like $2 if I recall. It was a sort of ritual. Everyone would take backpacks full of notebook paper, and before the movie (and during it if it sucked) we’d have a massive paper ball war. 

None of the movies sucked freshman year, though. We had Pulp Fiction, Gattaca, Braveheart, The Shawshank Redemption, The Lion King.  Those might have been the only ones I went to. Maybe The Graduate also, but that one turned into an all-night paper-fight and nobody really watched the movie. I missed a lot of weeks. Because I liked it so much, I didn’t want to go every week. I remember not being interested in seeing Gattaca, but I think it was Sterling that dragged me. Now it’s my favorite movie of all time.

Freshman year, I actually spent way more time with Sterling than Ryan. Because of his current level of fame and success, I’m always careful to avoid overstating the extent of our relationship. But I considered him a good friend and I still do even though we haven’t spoken in many years. He’s been busy!

Sterling and Ryan didn’t get together until years later, but I think a lot of us could see the writing on that wall long before it happened. Toward the end of that year, they were both in a play called Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. In the weeks leading up to it, Sterling was walking around the dorm acting strange, which made I and others roll our eyes and think, “he’s taking this acting thing too seriously.”. We see how that worked out. 

I remember sitting there watching him in that play and it was the strangest thing. I thought, I know this guy. I eat with him. Play video games with him. Go to movies with him. But this person on stage is NOT the man I know. He has actually become someone else!  And this girl that would become his wife, that I was so infatuated with at the time?  She was in the play, too, but I don’t remember her at all. That’s how good an actor Sterling K. Brown was even twenty-five years ago. 

But neither Ryan, nor any of the smoking hot girls running around my dorm, nor Sterling or any of the guys I liked was enough to keep me from leaving Stanford at the end of my freshman year. It was a combination of so many reasons. If money had not been an issue, I probably would have stayed, but I was disappointed academically, probably because I had the wrong expectations, and never got any good advice on how to approach my academic career. My advisor was Mary Edmonds, the Dean of Students, basically next in charge after the president Gerhard Casper and Condoleezza Rice. I probably should have asked her what to do, but by the time I had identified that there was a problem, it was too late. 

You see, people always think I have this huge ego, but I really don’t. I know what I know and I know what I’m capable of, but I almost always underestimate myself. My expectation was that a school like Stanford would be nothing but geniuses, and I was expecting (hoping even) to be one of the dumber people there. Why?  That’s how you learn. It’s just like basketball—you get better by playing against people better than you. I’d never encountered an academic challenge. Never. My favorite high school teacher Ms. Davis’ world history class was difficult enough to require EFFORT, but it wasn’t challenging. I was expecting Stanford to be HARD. 

But what I found was that the average Stanford kid was not a super-genius. They were smart, diligent, hard-working, but when I sat in rooms with them and ran the clockwork test, I was like, “Okay, even here most of them are still slower than me.”. I went to classes, and it was still easy. I say to people that I studied physics at Stanford but you won’t see any physics classes on my transcript because I never passed any of them. It wasn’t because they were too hard; it was that I was irritated by their focus on having us do math long-hand. I thought they were wasting my time asking me to sit down and do derivatives and integrals and calculate velocities in the computer age. I already knew that stuff. I wanted to study THEORY.

I was also annoyed that the high school “show your work” rule had followed me to college. I signed the fucking honor code. If I’m smart enough to look at the question and know the answer, what fucking difference does it make to you how I did it?  I started turning in gag assignments in my physics and math classes, when I bothered to do them at all, and stopped going to lectures altogether because most of the professors weren’t saying anything that wasn’t in the book. This is the downside of going to an elite research university. A lot of the professors are such research big shots or known social commentators that they don’t really want to teach. My Nobel Prize winning freshman physics professor Douglas Osheroff admitted in his Nobel autobiography that he hates teaching undergraduates because they didn’t appreciate the privilege of being taught by him. I always wondered if he was referring to me personally because I stopped going to his lectures really quick. There was no point in being there if you knew how to read the book. 

My freshman contemporaries at Stanford will recall me virtually never going to class, never doing homework. I would go to the computer lab to write papers at like 5am on the day they were due after a night of playing cards and video games. Some people might have suspected I’d been bounced out for academic non-performance, but if you look at my transcript, you’d be shocked. I had mostly Bs and Cs despite almost never attending class and putting in virtually no effort.

I only ever had one challengiing class at Stanford, during the second year when I attempted to return to school, 97-98. It was a quantum physics class mostly taken by graduate students, Physical Chemistry 231 or something like that. I had to drop it because there were a few basic but moderately difficult-to-learn mathematical operations you needed to have mastered, Fourier transforms and polar integrals. I hadn’t learned how to do these before, and by that time, having a car, and a nearly full-time job in the patent department at a cancer research company, on top of being disappointed that things hadn’t worked out with Ryan or this other girl I was interested in, there was just no way I was going to spend the week I needed sequestered learning that math. But I liked the class.

It’s funny, I remember Douglas Osheroff’s name because I had issues with his approach to lecturing. But I don’t remember this professor’s name and his lectures were interesting and engaging and showed what I felt was the proper respect for my time that any college professor should: he never repeated stuff that was in the book. He expected you to read it. His lectures were all stuff that wasn’t in the book, or explanations that made what was in the book more clear.  I always tell people these days when they tell me I’m smart that its because I’ve been fortunate to be around a lot of smart people and I listened. I often explain to people, as a way of getting them interested in quantum physics and making it easy to understand, how its entirely possible within the laws of physics for a baseball to pass through a concrete wall. People always find this fascinating and interesting. But I didn’t come up with that example myself. I got it from that professor.  

I should have gone straight to Physical Chemistry 231 freshman year. I was ready for it, but I didn’t feel that sure of myself. Excited to begin my academic career as I was, and with no distractions, I’d have probably learned Fourier transforms and polar integrals in one night. When I was sitting around playing cards and video games all the time, I think people thought I was lazy or apathetic. I wanted say, “Guys, you don’t get it. This is soooo boring. I expected it to be hard here but I’ve known this stuff since I was like ten!”. The fact is, I should have arrived at Stanford and acted like a graduate student from Day One, but because I held places like Stanford, Harvard and Yale in such esteem, I didn’t realize how far ahead of the curve I really was, even there. 

But it was this lack of an academic challenge, and the lack of the knowledge of what classes to take to find it, that led me to flee Stanford disappointed. But it was the people I met there that I loved that led me to try to come back. I actually finished I think two quarters of that second year, but it isn’t on my transcript and I  never got the credits because I still owed Stanford money from my freshman year. I think even Condoleezza Rice and Gerhard Casper would agree that back then, Stanford’s financial aid policy was all screwed up. By their policy for the last fifteen years or so, since Harvard got sued threatening it’s non-profit status, Stanford would be tuition-free for someone from a family as poor as mine. Back then, it should have been as well.

I should not have been asked to pay a dime for college. I was one of the most highly recruited students in the country. Schools were offering me BRIBES to go there!  I remember sitting at my kitchen table with a recruiter from a large state school. I was adding up the details of the “Presidential Scholarship” they had offered me. When I was done calculating, I looked up at him and said, “There’s like $8,000 a year leftover here.”. To which he replied, “Oh yes. That’s for you.”. So I was really offended when I got to Stanford and, after seizing all the private scholarship money I’d won, they asked my totally broke parents for $1,500. I’m like, fuck! Go ask Bill and Hillary Clinton for it!

But I returned to Stanford mainly out of a desire to reconnect with the friends I’d made. Ernst & Young, where I worked for the tax accountants to the stars, had discontinued my assignment and I needed to find new work. I did not like living in LA at all, so I made the move back to Palo Alto. 

Very few things had changed, except there were more smoking hot Black girls than ever, like there was an assembly line under the main quad turning them out. A great many of these smoking hot Black girls were members of the sorority Delta Sigma Theta, which Ryan eventually joined. Smoking hot as they were, me and these girls had ISSUES. First of all, I’m not a joiner personality type, so I don’t like the idea of fraternities, sororities, social clubs in general. At least that was how I felt then. When Ryan was pledging, I felt like her soon-to-be sorority sisters gave her a harder time than was necessary and I felt the reason was that they were jealous of her. So what did I do?

I used to write for Stanford’s Black community campus newspaper, The Real News. Man, I wrote some incendiary stuff in there! It all started early in my freshman year when a girl named Kalimah Fergus (also a member of Delta Sigma Theta if I recall) wrote an article in The Real News complaining that there were no good Black men at Stanford. I actually came to like Kalimah, but right then, I went nuclear.

I went to the editor of the paper and told him I wanted to write a response. And boy, did I!  I don’t even want to reprint what I said. I’m half-surprised Condoleezza Rice didn’t come to my dorm room and hold up a copy and say, “What the fuck, Michael?!?  This is not what we brought you here to do.”.  Hey, what can I say?  I was an eighteen year old virgin. I knew everything that was in every book, but at the same time, I didn’t know anything about anything.  A lot of those guys Kalimah was complaining about I would eventually learn were real scumbags. 

But this early forerunner to internet flame war earned me lots of cool points with most of the Black guys on campus, and got me a regular paying job as a columnist on The Real News. I next tried writing a scholarly piece on Clarence Thomas’ first three years on the Supreme Court, and nobody cared, so I went back to flame war. Hell, this was Stanford in the mid-90s, the Google founders and many other internet pioneers on campus, ground zero of Silicon Valley. I may have INVENTED flame war!  But the best was me vs. Delta Sigma Theta...

When Ryan was pledging, sororities have this whole thing where you aren’t supposed to talk to people. According to what I heard, Ryan had run into a mutual friend of ours and refused to ignore him as she was supposed to, and had a normal conversation with him. Apparently, she got in some kind of trouble for this. I was livid. I wrote an essay entitled “A Greek Tragedy” where I took a blowtorch to the entire idea of fraternities and sororities. While I never mentioned any of them by name, it was pretty obvious to any thinking person that it was mostly directed at the Deltas and that I was mad at them about Ryan.

This was a particularly reckless thing to do as a Black man, because for all the social power that White Greek organizations have in college, amongst Black students, the social power of Greek organizations is much greater. I’m surprised I didn’t suffer worse social consequences than I did. 

My editor at the time was a friend of mine, but I did not take into account when I turned this article in to him that he himself was dating a Delta (who he eventually married). So he made some unauthorized changes to soften the tone. I went apeshit. I confronted him in the parking lot behind our dorm and threatened to kill him if he ever did any shit like that again. I have to give it to him, he had balls. The next article I turned in, about a high school friend of mine who joined a Blood gang set and got killed, he did it again and I did not kill him, so I guess that makes me unreliable. 

But I could not tolerate his having changed “A Greek Tragedy” from its original incendiary tone, so I printed up hundreds of copies of the original version with a snide cover note stating that the newspaper version had been edited without my consent by a writer much less talented than me, and left them scattered around campus. Back then, I could be a Grade A Asshole. 

I don’t think Ryan ever made any comment to me whatsoever about that article. As a more mature person, I look back at writing that as having kind of put her in a bad position. Everybody knew it was about her, and it wasn’t like she could publicly agree with it, but she couldn’t publicly criticize me either because suppose I turned my pen on her.  I’d have NEVER done that. If she had complained, I would have apologized and wrote a retraction even though I thought I was right. But back then, I never really considered before I published it that it put her in an awkward position. What did I think? She was going to quit the sorority she’d just joined and fall into my arms?  LOL well, yeah, kinda. 

She did not do that. But one of the things I respect most about Ryan is that in the time that I knew her, regardless of my feelings about her, or all the different things I tried to do about it, sublime or stupid, she never changed the way she treated me. I can’t say that about any other girl. 

Believe it or not, even after all that, a Delta actually went on a date with me. Her name was Ayanna and...OMG, one of the smoking hottest girls I’ve EVER known. Top twenty. Maybe top ten. I was so excited when she agreed to go out with me. I spent days trying to find the perfect place to take her and finally settled on this Cuban restaurant in San Francisco that has a hollowed-out airplane inside. But the date was over before we got off campus and it’s a great example of what an immature jerk I was, and how despite all my whining about my romantic misfortunes, I’ve fumbled the ball so many times. 

Ayanna was studying marketing, and in my car on the street leading off campus, we were talking about this. She was giving me a speech about the power of advertising, and I asserted to her that ads don’t really affect my decision-making. She objected to this as impossible, and to prove her point, she asked me, “What brand of toothpaste do you use?”. I told her Crest. She seemed to think this HAD to be because Crest was the most advertised brand, and at that moment, I completely tuned her out and lost interest. Over something that small. Why?  Because if she really thought that I, Michael David Boyd, was so stupid that I blindly used the most popular brand of toothpaste because they had lots of ads on TV, she was not the girl for me. Case closed.

But that is so stupid and immature. I had at least that whole night to show her who I was. I should have said what I was thinking: “Oh my God, do you KNOW how many kinds of toothpaste I tried before I picked the one I use?!? Aquafresh, Colgate, Rembrandt, Tom’s of Fucking Maine, just about everything. And I don’t even use the main popular Crest. I use a weird one that I always have to go all over the place looking for. I picked it because it’s the one I liked best after trying dozens.” Then things might have gotten interesting. 

But I didn’t even continue the conversation about it. I let her think she was right and said to myself, “She’s stupid.”. But Ayanna’s probably working on Madison Avenue somewhere making millions and probably married to a millionaire besides. Who’s stupid? Me!  I don’t even remember the rest of the date. I tuned her out that much over that little thing, and I never told her why. I did eventually come to think I had overreacted, and in addition to being historically smoking hot, Ayanna was really nice. So I asked her out again,  but she politely, graciously and probably wisely declined. I never thought about it until now, but it was probably the nicest, most skillful rejection I ever got.

Years and years later, I would be reminded of something I had forgotten that would make me feel terrible about my printed flame war piece on the Deltas. I was going through the box I kept of all my academic memorabilia, and I found something I had totally forgotten about. When I was senior in high school, the Kansas chapter of Delta Sigma Theta had given me a scholarship. It was only a few hundred dollars and Stanford seized it, but that’s beside the point. I’d gotten small scholarships from some other Black Greek organizations, too. If I had remembered this at the time, I would never had written that article. I can say I didn’t remember, but it is a person’s responsibility to remember things like that. I’ve always said that I despise hypocrisy, but that is a clear-cut and unforgivable instance of hypocrisy by me.

I’d had negative feelings about fraternities and sororities long before Stanford, especially since a Kappa who played football for USC knocked up my sister and didn’t fulfill his obligations as a father, made even worse by the fact that my niece never blamed him and always loved him anyway. But feeling how I did about Greek organizations, I never should have accepted scholarship money from them. And if I did, I certainly shouldn’t have gone to college on that scholarship money and then ripped them in a newspaper article. In retrospect, that was truly shameful. Now, it occurred to me that perhaps no one had ever put two-and-two together, and maybe never would, but the one thing I decided long ago in life was to always own up and never try to bury anything. I was about to write an apology to the Deltas seven years ago, but my arrest stopped me from getting around to it. All those girls are now doctors, lawyers, multimillionaires, elected officials...movie stars. The masters of the universe. And still so smoking hot!!!!  So, better late than never: Sorry, girls!  By the end of this, you’ll know that I got what I deserved...

That summer, 1997, both Ryan and Sterling were around. At the end of the school year, Ryan asked me to help her move, and it’s the strangest thing. I did it. I think I did it. But I don’t remember that day at all. I remember her asking me. Actually, I don’t even remember that. I remember the fact that she asked me. I think I vaguely remember her calling me and being shocked that she had called me and not knowing where she got my number. And I remember the street of the apartment that she was moving to. Even in the summer, Ryan could have gotten the whole male student body to show up to help her move, but I can’t remember other people being there. This girl I liked so much, you’d think I’d remember everything about it. But I just flat can’t remember a damn thing...like it has been erased. 

I love Frank Lloyd Wright. Love’s not a strong enough word. I can explain it this way. I know the church where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his last speech, “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop”. I’ve been there many times. As a child, I used to run through the pews and play on the microphone while my father was having meetings in the back with other preachers. I know how it smells, the red fabric on the pews, the gap underneath the glass doors on the side where the sun shines through. Well, Frank Lloyd Wright buildings are to me what you would think that church would be, me being the son of a Black preacher who criss-crossed the country during the same era as Dr. King, though on a very different mission. 

There is a Frank Lloyd Wright house on Stanford’s campus, the Hanna House. It is one of my favorite examples of his work. Back then, very few students knew it was there. Perhaps they still don’t. The house was deeded to the University and last I knew, a school official was living there. It was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that collapsed the Bay Bridge and suspended the World Series. Until around the year 2000, it was unoccupied and being slowly restored. But it wasn’t gated or locked. I used to go sit there alone on the back patio and pretend it was mine. My dream for over twenty years has been that one day, I’ll be an important enough person in the Stanford network that they will let me live there, at least for a while. 

That summer, in early July, I took Ryan up to the Hanna House to tell her what she already knew—that I was...I can’t say it now. It was a cool summer day as is often the case in the Bay area. She was wearing a white sweater and she looked so...I can’t say it. We sat on the brick wall by the front driveway and I gave her my little speech. I don’t remember what she said except that it wasn’t exactly what I hoped to hear. But she didn’t make me feel bad. Ryan never made me feel bad.  A mutual female friend of ours, who I would later fall in love with, told me a few days later that Ryan, frustrated with my having made such a big thing of it when we really didn’t know each other that well, had said, “Why can’t he just ask me to go to a movie?”. I was going to the movies all the time back then, and she was an actress, it’s obvious. But I never thought of it. Why? Because Ryan never talked about movies. She was always talking about more serious stuff. 

By that time, Ryan and Sterling were dancing around and toward each other, and I knew that he was her man. I knew it when I took her up to the Hanna House. What I was doing was more that anything else giving her a last chance to change her mind. I knew she hadn’t changed it. So, the next week, I took Sterling up to the Hanna House and I made him promise me he’d take care of her. He kept his promise...though I was worried for a minute. 

In the year 2000, I was riding around LA with Ryan in my car. We weren’t alone. We were with a mutual female friend who last knew I knew was a lawyer for NASA (you other guys gotta learn to just quit—these girls are UNSTOPPABLE!). I was taking them somewhere, who the fuck knows. Ryan was upset because apparently Sterling had developed an interest in a Jewish girl at NYU where they were both going to graduate school. Because I know how people are, I want to stress that Ryan did not mention that the girl was Jewish in way that was negative or inappropriate. She just said it by way of general description.  This was before I had come to recognize the smoking hotness and general awesomeness of Jewish girls, so it didn’t mean anything to me at the time. All I was thinking was, “If Sterling’s thinking about any girl other than you, the boy must have lost his mind!”. But I didn’t say that. I just listened.

A lot of guys would have thought, “Now’s my chance!” and tried to hit on Ryan in that situation. And because I knew Sterling and we’d hung out for a while, there was always stuff that I could have told Ryan to try to make him look bad. I had plenty of opportunities after I talked with Sterling at the Hanna House to try to sabotage him with Ryan. But I’d have never considered doing such a dishonorable thing. I’d told Sterling I wouldn’t, and by that point, it was my firm belief that they were made for each other, whether they knew it yet or not. I was certain they’d get married and be together forever and I was right. That was the last time I saw Ryan.

I think back about that conversation and I chuckle to myself and think, “I wonder if that Jewish girl could have been one of you that I’m writing about here?”. Sterling and I had a history of liking the same kinds of girls. Ryan wasn’t the only one. As his star ascended, and hearing the stuff you hear about the openness of the relationship culture of Hollywood, I couldn’t push the thought out of my mind: I wonder how many of you he might...umm...be acquainted with. 

I started thinking, you know, it’s a common story: guy marries his high school or college girlfriend. He gets rich and famous, she gets older...I could not stop this unhealthy line of thinking. Then I watched Black Panther, and realizing that Sterling was in the Marvel Universe, I just couldn’t help it...I wonder how well he might...umm...know Scarlett Johansson. I started thinking about all the smoking hot young actresses running around Hollywood and...no, he wouldn’t. Then I started to think, Ryan is 40-something now, I wonder how she’s looking these days. Will I be hearing about their divorce soon (a prospect I would have considered tragic, not appealing)? And then I Google Image searched Ryan Michelle Bathe for the first time ever. OMG. 

Ryan is way smoking hotter now than she was back in college. Her red carpet photos are just absurd. Lupita Nyong’o gets a lot of credit for being the red carpet style queen, and deservedly so—she always looks great and is also smoking hot and really good at her job too. But Ryan’s right there with her in destroying the red carpet. I thought, Sterling’s crazy if he’s looking at any other girl in Hollywood—Ryan’s like one of the smoking hottest ones there! I also thought, when I saw how good she looked, and knowing how she can be at parties, some of you girls who are way better at the job must HATE her!

I always had the biggest crush on Vanity as a kid/teenager. For a while, I thought she was the hottest girl in the world, and she seemed to be a really nice person, too. It’s so sad she died. I had been watching The Last Dragon recently, which is one of my all-time favorite movies. I was stuck watching the scene where Bruce Leroy sees Laura Charles on street the first time, because it felt a lot like that to me when I saw Scarlett, an ordinary guy crossing paths in public with a beautiful star. But as I was watching the movie, I went back and looked at some of Ryan’s pictures, and I thought, “Hey wait a minute, Ryan is WAAY smoking hotter than Vanity! And I know her!”. 

I realized that part of the reason I’d never asked Ryan out to the movies was because I didn’t like to think about her as an actress  This was because, based on that first play I saw her in, and some of her very early professional work, I had developed the opinion that she wasn’t very good at it, which was shocking to me because I couldn’t imagine Ryan not being great at something she tried to do. I couldn’t watch. I always tried to take a peek at everything Sterling was in, but to this day, I’ve never watched anything Ryan’s done.  I started watching Good Fences, which I strongly disliked for reasons other than her, but even so I thought she was miscast in it. 

I had mentioned to my sister who worked at Fox (in a non-entertainment capacity), and a few friends from Stanford that I didn’t think much of Ryan’s acting skills. It never occurred to me that anyone would repeat it to her, but someone probably did. I remember once a few years after school, I was at my sister’s condo in LA and she told me she had called Ryan and talked to her.  I was shocked and appalled. I don’t even know where she got Ryan’s number—I didn’t have it, and considering that she only knew Ryan existed because of me, I thought it was highly highly inappropriate but there was no point in saying anything after the fact. My sister is a completely incorrigible person who does what she wants without regard for anybody. But I felt certain she probably told Ryan that I’d said I didn’t think she was very good. My sister and the couple of other people I said that to probably thought it was sour grapes because she wouldn’t date me, but nothing could be further from the truth. Ryan was still one of the people I loved and respected most in the world. I talked about movies and actors all the time, whether I knew them or not. We were both in a sense professionals in the same industry. I thought she’d be the last person to want me to lie and say I thought she was good if I didn’t think it was true. 

But as a more mature person, I realized that in making that evaluation, I should have added something that is also true. I once heard an industry insider describe a movie or television production as being like a large temporary corporation, with the producer and director as CEO and COO. This is very apt. And like any corporation, the value of an employee depends on much more than just their level of skill at their particular specialization. The job of being an actor entails much more than just what you do in front of the camera, and if you’re trying to get something done—anything—Ryan Michelle Bathe is a handy person to have around. 

And besides that, I have no idea how good an actress Ryan is today, or even ten years ago because I haven’t been watching. She could be like Ben Affleck, who I didn’t think was very good starting out, but he obviously worked really hard on it for years, and now I think he’s a very good actor (and an even better director). Maybe Ryan’s done the same thing. But my not following her career was a kind of emotional self-protection. I can’t stand watching someone I like struggle at anything. I’m an anti-hater. I root for success for everybody...if they are trying to do something good. 

A strange thing happened to me about ten years ago. I was laying on my couch flipping channels, and there’s Ryan. It’s one thing when you sit down to watch something featuring someone you know, but it’s a weird feeling when you’re just randomly channel surfing and suddenly you’re staring at a face that is so familiar, a girl that you had such feelings about. It’s one of those moments you realize how lucky you’ve been, when you randomly see girls you know on television. It was a movie she did called Leaving Barstow, a scene in a restaurant where she’s talking to a guy sitting at a table. Instantly, I could tell she was a lot better than I remembered. I wanted to watch it, but then she smiled—that same little half-smile Scarlett does—and she looked even more beautiful than I remembered, and it took me back to what it felt like when she smiled at me like that, and I just couldn’t bear it. I had to turn it off. 

Over the years, I’d thought to myself that I knew Ryan could be really good if I wrote something specifically for her. But why didn’t I ever try to make it happen?  Monogamy. That’s one of the central themes of this blog. We think of monogamy as something to control men and benefit women, but monogamy hurts women more than men. Would Sterling have minded if I tried to help his wife’s career? Almost certainly not, but that is too casual an analysis. If I was working with her to write something for her, that would mean spending time with her. Sterling was busier so he wouldn’t have been around. That’s how stuff happens. My perception of Ryan was “she would never” but if I was wrong, it would have been too late by the time I found out. So my respect for the husbands of the girls I loved kept me away from all of them when there were things that I wanted to do and could have done to make their lives (and their husbands’ lives!) better.

But at the same time, while I WANTED to do those things, I thought it was absolutely unfair (and God was the only blamable party) that I should have to be bending over backward to help girls I loved and the men they married instead of me when I was still lonely. I felt like it would have been being too good a person, that girls deserved to serve whatever penalty losing me was to them if they chose to give all their affection to someone else. I thought it would have been crass and insulting and inapproriate (and in some instances dangerous) to say to the husband, “Hey, if I do this for you guys, can I borrow her for a weekend?”. Or like the National Guard—one weekend a month, two weeks a year. That sounded horribly wrong by all the social and religious and cultural standards we are taught, but deep down, that felt like a just arrangement to me. 

But as much as I thought about trying to do something to help Ryan’s career, I thought about my desire to help Sterling even more. I was mystified as the years passed after Stanford that his career seemed stuck in slow motion. I love Denzel Washington and Will Smith, but I was looking cross-eyed at them thinking, “You guys are getting a little old for this. How about we give STERLING K. BROWN a shot to headline some of these movies?”. Sterling was getting nothing but good reviews for the work he was doing, but yet it seemed he couldn’t break out. Knowing that Hollywood is an industry where youth is king, I was getting worried that his prime years might pass by. As more time went by, and Sterling was in an out-of-the-way Lifetime show Army Wives, with bit parts in movies here and there, Righteous Kill and Our Idiot Brother, there were times I felt like going Sam Jackson in The Negotiator and running up in the Fox Tower with a handgun and a bottle of Pennzoil and forcing them to hire him. “Oh, you don’t feel like casting Sterling K. Brown? Well, we’re going to stay here until you do!”. 

Finally, with the OJ movie and This is Us, things started to happen for him and I was excited and relieved. It might surprise Sterling, and the rest of the cast, to know that when I was in prison, This Is Us was the most popular show. When it came on, the TV of practically every English-speaking person was on ABC. Young, old, Black, White, Mexican, gang members, murderers, petty thieves, corporate embezzlers, con artists, child molesters, the guilty, the innocent, everyone loved it. Each week, after the show people would walk around and talk to each other about what had happened. I felt so proud of Sterling, when he won his Emmy, when This Is Us became one of the highest rated shows on TV. But I only mentioned to a couple of people that I knew him, and even then just said that we were at Stanford together. The #metoo movement was just breaking, and it was an era of a different type of social distancing in Hollywood. Given the crime I had been accused of, and the fact that he had been loosely attached to my movie All-Nighter with it’s toxic would-be producers, I didn’t want to start a chain-reaction that would result in someone sticking a microphone in his face and asking him about his association with me. I’m not worried about that now because as soon as I get the forum, I can categorically prove my innocence to any thinking person. I was just giving the prison-industrial complex time to dig its own grave. 

Shortly after I got out of prison, Sterling hosted Saturday Night Live. He was fantastic and broke the internet. Some people were surprised given that he had done mostly dramatic roles that he was so good at comedy, but I wasn’t. I remembered him from school as kind of a jokester. He used to come to the dining hall for breakfast in his bathrobe.  That night after his SNL show, I went online to see what people were saying about it. I went to Google and typed in the letter “S”—just the letter “S”—and the first suggestion that came up was “Sterling K Brown”. That’s how hot he was that night. I dunno, we went to college with the Google guys. Maybe they rigged it LOL. 

Since Sterling was so good on SNL, I’m sure they will be having him back. I was reading some of what I’ve written on this blog and thinking, “Man, I’m going to get murdered by a gang of Hollywood husbands!”. Remembering that Sterling was on SNL, and that Scarlett’s fiancee Colin works on there, I wrote a skit based on that idea for them and Amanda Seyfried’s husband Thomas Sadoski. I don’t know how to act and I don’t want to be on TV. You can get Anthony Anderson to play me. I don’t know if Colin would be willing to say the funniest line I want him to say on television. I don’t know if NBC would LET him say it, but it would be hilarious. It works without Scarlett, Ryan and Amanda, but if they wanted to participate, I could work them in. This would be “All You Can Eat Fish”, “Steroid Olympics” awesome. 

But while Sterling was finally on the map, I still wanted to see him doing more, and while I never sat down to write anything for him, I was constantly trying to think of ideas for movie projects he could star in. I watched Black Panther and I was mad. Look, Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan are both really good actors, but in my book Sterling’s better than them, so I was upset by the fact he only got a few minutes. 

When I wrote All-Nighter, Ryan and Sterling both were at one point going to be in it. Since I and the other producers knew them, and they had established careers, it was natural to reach out to them for help.  But I secretly didn’t really want Sterling in the movie. I didn’t think there was any part that was a fit for him, and the part that he wanted (and would have gotten if the production went through with me out of the decision-making process), he was totally wrong for it. Twenty years too young. But he’s old enough now...

But the part in it that Ryan wanted, I’d written perhaps not necessarily for her, but because of her. It was a very small part, the main character’s mother in a few flashback scenes. But those scenes were critically important to understanding the character (his mother is intentionally never shown in the present-tense although she is an off-screen driver of his actions). The primary psychology of the main character is that his mother’s love is the only safe space he has ever known, but as a young man, he’s trying to figure out how to break away from it to establish his independence. The scenes with his mother were directly inspired by something that happened with Ryan...

Toward the end of senior year, I’d written a paper called “Deliverance” that I had printed and bound and circulated around campus. It was an essay directed toward men, essentially saying that we’re better than women give us credit for, and we should hold our heads high because the many of us were being blamed for the bad actions of a few, a few that women chose to allow to abuse them. Needless to say, that is not my position today, but when I wrote that, I was a 21 year old virgin frustrated in love who had been rejected by half a dozen of the most awesome girls in the world in the space of a few years. So, its understandable. 

I did not plan or expect that she would, but to my surprise, Ryan actually read it, and she thought that some of the critical things I said about women in general might have been specifically directed at her. So in keeping with her character, she came right to me to talk about it. 

She found me sitting alone in a lounge in the dorm where we’d both lived. Ryan was never confrontational or judgmental. She was so grown up and probably has been forever. She didn’t accuse me of anything. She asked me about it, and I explained what I had written and that none of the negative things I’d said were directed at her. She accepted this, and then she told me some things I didn’t know. I’m not going to tell you what she said because it’s private, but in a few minutes, she very gently gave me a big little education. It reminded me of the conversations I used to have with June because I felt, “This girl is so much smarter than me.”. When she stood up to leave, I sat there looking up at her, feeling like a child looking up at his mother, and I thought, “I would follow you anywhere.”. 

There was something else I knew about Ryan that I wasn’t there to see, but perhaps that’s because if I’d been there, it never could have happened the way it did. Our dorm used to organize a ski trip to Lake Tahoe every year. You know you’re dealing with bourgeois Black kids when they have an annual ski trip to Lake Tahoe. I never went for a lot of reasons. I thought, and I believe at one point, said, “What the fuck, guys?!? Let’s go to Vegas!”. To which I got lots of responses about being too young to legally drink and gamble, but I’d been having a great time in Vegas without gambling or drinking since I was a teenager.  Also, as much as I love traveling, large group trips almost always turn to disaster. 

To that end, one year at the end of the ski trip weekend, the cabin that they had rented was totally trashed as you might expect with a bunch of college kids partying. And as you might expect of a bunch of spoiled rich kids many of whom were too lazy to take their half-eaten meal trays back to the dining hall, nobody wanted to clean up. It became this big tiff arguing about whose responsibility it was, until Ryan, who I’m sure had no part in making the mess, got down on the floor in her Prada pants and cleaned the place herself.  I don’t know that they were Prada pants. I just always say that to illustrate the fact that whatever Ryan was wearing, I’m sure it was nice. 

When I heard that story, it was one of the first things that made me really fall in love with her (like I wasn’t from the very beginning). It reminded me of the part in The Fountainhead where Dominique goes to live in the tenement. There is something I used to say to people to describe how I felt about her. I said that if aliens came to this planet and said that we were fuck-ups and they were going to destroy us, and I was given the chance to select one person to send them as evidence that we deserved to survive, I would send Ryan. That was how I felt for a long time. 

I haven’t seen or talked to her in twenty years. People change, so it would probably be a little reckless and dangerous for us all for me to send her on that mission now. These days, I’d probably send Natalie Portman. Although Natalie can kind of piss people off sometimes. I don’t know if she might have that same effect on extraterrestrials. Maybe Condoleezza Rice would be better. Hillary Clinton would do a better job than you think—we’d probably be fine. But if you don’t send a girl, we’re toast. However, never, under any circumstances, would I send Scarlett. She’s too much of a wildcard. She might get us liquidated with the first word out of her mouth. I’d want to wait for the results with Scarlett. 

Most of these things I’ve written about with Ryan go back decades. I haven’t seen her in twenty years. We were friends on Facebook but the extent of our interaction there was she liked one post of mine about Black people not tipping, and when she asked her friends for a car recommendation, I gave her one. I just about never went to her page. So why did I decide to write this now?  

Yesterday, July 27, was Ryan’s birthday. She’s been on my mind a lot lately because of the particular way in which she was a part of my Scarlett encounter.  When I was arrested last October, and spent three months in jail, another inmate had a recent copy of People magazine. Torture though it is, I always looked through these magazines in jail and prison because I would see people I knew and places I’d been and it would help keep me grounded that I wasn’t the person that I was being treated as if I was. 

You can hardly flip through any entertainment-oriented magazine without seeing a picture of Scarlett, but imagine my surprise when I turn a page, and there’s an article about and by Ryan, talking about the differences in cultural views on spanking children. It was a really good article. I’d expect nothing less. I’d always had strong feelings about this issue that pretty much mirrored what she expressed in the article, and I felt a sad sense of regret that I’d never talked to her about it back then. I was used to seeing Scarlett everywhere, but now I couldn’t get away from Ryan either. Did I run around the jail showing everyone this smoking hot famous girl in a magazine and bragging “I know her!”?  No. I didn’t tell a soul. 

And I just remembered, like Scarlett, Ryan is from the New York area and if I recall correctly, her mother, who I met once twenty-five years ago, is or was a Broadway actress. Is it possible that Ryan knew Scarlett BEFORE they both became actresses?  Hmmm...And I think about this now because there was one thing about that encounter...

I’m always very careful to point out that Scarlett didn’t give me “the eye” or anything. There was nothing at all romantic about her look. But when I think about it, one thing feels certain: she looked at me like she knew me. And look, it is very possible. I was going through Scarlett’s movies a while back and she’s been in so many with people that either I’ve met or are once removed from people I’ve met. Part of my telling this story about Ryan is to illustrate how far away from Scarlett Johansson I’m NOT. But there’s something else...

I’ve mentioned that the night I saw Scarlett, I went to sleep crying in my room, but I’ve never told the whole story of what happened that night, and the role Ryan played in it. I’m going to tell it now. 

That night, I had some time to kill before my fateful “date”, so I decided to take a walk around. I was standing on the walkway that goes over the main entrance to City Centre, looking up at the full moon. Neil Armstrong had just died, and I’d recently heard a radio interview where I had learned that when the astronauts were preparing to leave for the first moon landing, the NASA scientists told them that their chances of making it back alive were about fifty-fifty. And they still went.  I was standing there thinking about this, and about Jessie, the most beautiful girl I had ever met before Scarlett, who I’d been with when I visited the Aria for the first time almost exactly two years earlier. I came up with an idea...

When I returned from my first and only trip to New York City, I wrote and posted on my website a short story called “Synapse” which I truly thought was brilliant, and I’m generally a pretty tough critic of my own work. Because it is my goal to try to be a great writer, I’m always trying to think of innovative approaches to crafting stories. In thinking about this, I came up with the idea of making an innovation in writing that had been made in movies—going from black-and-white to color. What could I do with a story if I used colored text to add new dimensions?  It turned out that this was the perfect innovation to allow me to do something I’d been trying to figure out how to do that seemed impossible: writing in real-time. 

I was always fascinated by the old Johnny Depp movie “Nick of Time”. While I can’t say its a great movie, it is one of the most ambitipus and creative films ever made. It is told in real-time. The running time of the movie is the same span of time as the story we see on the screen. I thought this was such a great idea, I was surprised it didn’t become kind of a new genre of filmmaking. I would have been fascinated to see the same technique applied to some stronger stories, and developed with filmmakers practicing at the very challenging task of executing it. 

I’d played around with stream-of-consciousness type writing, but I could never get it to be what I wanted. With color, I could do it. Synapse was only a couple of pages long. It tells the story of a struggling musician on his way to pick up a too-small paycheck from a recent gig.  The entire story is his thoughts as he walks a single block on West 52nd Street in Manhattan, east from 7th Avenue to 6th, on the south side of the street past Bobby Flay’s now-closed Bar Americain. There is a girl walking up 6th Avenue and at the corner of 52nd and 6th, they meet. His thoughts are all in blue ink and hers are in pink as they walk toward the place where they meet. But from the beginning, the story of their subsequent relationship is told in reverse in green (I wanted to use purple but it looked too close to the blue). The story thus begins with “Goodbye” in green and ends with “Hello” in blue. 

It was exceptionally hard to write because I had to try to develop these characters from just a few lines of their inner monologues without the opportunity to fall back on ANY narrative description. But the other “Nick of Time”-inspired part was that it was designed to take exactly the same amount of time to read as it actually takes to walk that block, which I had a good sense of because I was staying a block away at the Hilton and walked that block many times wishing I could afford Bar Americain. I thought the story was really brilliant. Unfortunately, it may be lost along with a lot of my past writing because my evil step-sister erased my hard drive while I was in prison.  Sergey, Larry, Mark, Marissa Mayer (I wish I’d known YOU were around back at Stanford!), whoever runs GoDaddy that I more than likely went to college with or worked for somewhere along the way, I hope you guys actually keep back-ups of everything forever...

Anyway, that night in Vegas, I decided to try to do something similar, but even more ambitious. I was going to write an epic poem in the tradition of the “My Life...” series that I’d posted and a lot of people liked. This one was going to be a narration of what I saw, thought and felt as I walked around Vegas that night, designed for readers to be able to follow the path that I had walked and for it to be in real-time. It began, “Seven hundred days since, the memory still amazes, At City Centre, praying for second chances in Vegas...”

I walked around to some of my favorite places, writing this poem in my head about what I was seeing and everything going through my mind at that seminal moment in my life. I’d just gotten off of dialysis after my life-threatening kidney failure episode and I had just made the decision to sever the last of the toxic friendships remaining from my Stanford days. In the prior two years, I’d lost touch with every girl I loved, except the one I’d come to Vegas to see. 

It’s funny, I was going down the escalator in front of Planet Hollywood when I wrote a line about the one-time holder of the Most Beautiful Girl I’ve Ever Seen title, ironically named Scarlett, and I’d written something like “Not Scarlett Johansson, the Scarlett that I know...”. This was maybe ten minutes before I was going to run into Scarlett (Johansson) and that title was going to change hands. 

I had gotten lost in my work, and I realized it was after 9pm. I was supposed to meet my “date” in the distant Las Vegas suburb of Summerlin at 9:30. It was bad enough for her to ask me to drive almost an hour away from The Strip to meet her, especially when she had refused a year earlier to go on an hour-long ride with me to see one of my favorite places on earth, Frank Lloyd Wright’s last building, the Marin County Civic Center, where my favorite movie Gattaca was filmed. I was going to take her on a private tour of it, which back then I had the ability to do at a particular time on particular days. I should have known she was not the girl for me when I told her “ I want to show you this amazing place tomorrow.” and she said, “How far is it?”. God, Scarlett, I’m SOOOO sorry. I should have known better!

There was a moment where I thought, “This poem is too good to let myself risk forgetting what I have. I should blow off this date, go back up to my room, take out my computer and finish this right now.”. I think now that I should have done exactly that, but if I’d made that decision, would I have still been in the Aria lobby at the right moment to see Scarlett?

But on that night, I felt that I loved this girl I was going to meet. I thought about her smile during the breakfast date we’d had. I thought about her leg resting against mine under the table at my best friend’s wedding reception. I thought about her voice on the phone that morning saying that she wanted to see my hotel room. No piece of writing was important enough to miss that date. 

So at that, I took a shortcut through the lobby of the Aria to get back to my hotel to get my car. As I was approaching the north exit, a flash of bright blue to my left caught my attention. I looked and there was a girl getting off the elevator, wearing a white t-shirt and a pair of aqua blue pajama pants that looked like they cost $1,000. She had a beige sweater tied around her waist, and was pulling a small silver roller suitcase. There was honestly a moment where I wasn’t sure if she was real. She was too perfect to actually exist. But more that, there was something about her presence that seemed so powerful. She was walking with a much older woman, and talking with a kind of authoritative air that made it clear she was the more important of the two. If you’d told me the person who runs the whole world was in that room, I’d have said “It must be her.”.  It never even would have crossed my mind that she was Scarlett Johansson, because I’d have never thought anyone that small and thin was Scarlett, nor would I have expected Scarlett to behave like the Queen of the World. 

There were a few other people around, but for just after 9pm on a Friday night of a holiday weekend in Vegas, it was curiously empty, like the Red Sea had parted for this girl to walk through. She was walking in front of me from left to right, about seventeen feet away. At first I was walking toward her, but I was going to have to turn to my right to get to the exit that she was walking straight toward. At the last moment before I made that turn, without breaking the rhythm of her graceful walk, without pausing in what she was saying to the woman with her, and without altering the strangely beautiful, elegant hand gesture she was doing to emphasize what seemed to be something very important she was saying, she turned just her eyes to look at me. To this day, I feel like I stopped and stared, but I never stopped. I passed her and never looked back. And because of that, I feel like I’m still frozen standing in that lobby staring into those beautiful kind-of-green eyes, unable to change that moment, trapped in it for all time. 

I still wrestle with whether that was the right or wrong decision not to stop. That girl I was going to meet, at that moment, I thought I was going to marry her. She was really tall and athletic, and I’d thought, if we had a son, I’d teach him to be the greatest basketball player ever...if he wanted to do that. I’d imagined our whole life together. I’d known her for eight years. The only thing that had kept me from pursuing her was that when we met, she seemed like she had an interest in my best friend. But after he married someone else, I asked him if he would mind if I tried to pursue something with her. He said he didn’t, but he warned me she was difficult. I should have listened. 

But I was so excited about this girl who I’d known for a long time. What, I’m going to stop on my way to a date with her to talk to some girl I don’t even know who just happens to be smoking hot?  But that was the wrong analysis. I didn’t take time to think about it, but that girl I saw was much more than just smoking hot, and I knew it, and my eventual realization of her identity confirmed it. 

There is a part of me that feels like the universe immediately started punishing me for that decision and still hasn’t stopped. On the way to Summerlin, I got lost, which NEVER happens to me. I remember thinking as I was trying to get my bearings, to me the Strip is like heaven and the rest of Las Vegas is like hell. When I say I love Vegas, what I really mean is I love the Strip. 

When I got to the restaurant where we were meeting, I looked around for her and found her on the outdoor patio...sitting at a table with five other people.  Men do a lot of shitty, dishonorable things in relationships and dating, but this is one thing girls do that is inexcusable. You should never EVER have a man come to meet you without mentioning if you’re going to have friends there.

The irony is, her friends were great. We had a few hours of lively, interesting conversation and under proper circumstances it would have been a great outing. She started to get pissy because her friends seemed to take more of an interest in me than her and she ceased being the center of attention. Toward the end of the night, I told a mildly funny joke about cocaine, and everybody got it but her. She got really bitchy about it, insisting that it wasn’t funny because she didn’t get it. I let it go as quick as I could, but I had the feeling that any hope of a relationship between us had died in that moment. Truthfully, I don’t think there was ever any hope. My theory now is that she was just trying to make my best friend jealous. 

Still, at the end of the night, standing in the parking lot, I tried to get her to come back to The Strip to go out with me. She said she was too tired, which was not at all credible. This girl was a late-night club circuit ALL-STAR. That’s how we met. As I was on my way to the date with her, I was thinking that down the road in our relationship, I would tell her that I’d walked past the most amazing girl on my way to her that night, and that I didn’t stop or look back. Standing in that parking lot, I thought about saying the same thing to her in a very different tone, but I didn’t. I told myself what I was always taught to believe when it comes to women and their romantic decisions: she doesn’t owe me anything. But she did. She owed me a basic human respect that she didn’t give me. 

It’s funny. I wrote in one of my pieces about porn the idea that came to me that porn might be some kind of a punishment for girls who had done something bad. Well, I’m pretty sure I saw that girl in a porno. Not pretty sure. It’s her. I’d go to the Aria betting window on it. It’s not grainy UFO footage. It’s close up, in HD and its her. I’d actually seen a few seconds flash of it before and thought, “Hey, that looks like...”. Then I stumbled upon the whole video and was like, “OMG, it IS!”. And Jesus Fucking Christ, that video is so HOT!  She is so good at what she’s doing in it, which I would not have necessarily expected. I’m really mad at her for what she did, but I’m not mad when I’m watching that. I have some conflicted feelings about porn as I discussed in the pieces I posted about it. But that is one porno that is completely guilt-free for me. I deserve to be able to see it. What’s in that video is how that night should have ended, but didn’t. I wonder, is it possible that somehow that was Scarlett’s revenge? Nah, she’d never...

I left that restaurant disappointed and drove back to The Strip. It was after midnight when I valeted my car back at the Vdara, but I was restless and unsatisfied, and it was Friday night, so I decided to walk around. Was I hoping to find the girl from the Aria lobby again? Yes, a little, but she’d had her suitcase with her. I knew she was gone. I’ve been to Vegas 19 times, mostly by myself and usually staying in suites in the nicer hotels (The Venetian, Trump, Wynn—I hate the Bellagio, though I do like the fountain and the check-in area ceiling). But while I know its kind of “the thing to do” in Vegas, I’ve never tried to pick up a girl for a one-night stand. Never been to a strip club. Never hired a prostitute. And I’d never tried to pick up a strange girl. I’d never even thought about it, but I was thinking about it that night. But I knew myself. I wanted that girl I’d seen in the Aria lobby, or the girl I’d walked past her to meet. No one else would do.  And even in their cases, sex was not the primary objective. Love was. And I didn’t think I was going to find that trolling casinos at 2am. 

I walked around until nearly 3am. The last of my thoughts of trying to have a “What Happens In Vegas...” night expired when I let pass by two ummm...seemingly friendly smoking hot girls walking through the Luxor holding hands, one in a red minidress, the other in a black one. I’d tried to recapture the poem, but while a remembered a lot of it, the mood to continue it was gone, and the real-time theme was destroyed by the fact that I’d left for three hours. I decided to go back to my room. 

I was walking along outside the Excalibur, and there were two middle-aged White guys sitting on the grass talking. I said hello as I passed and they asked me to come sit down and talk with them. I did. They were a little drunk, but not sloppily so, in that friendly mode where they wanted to talk to people. It turned out they were a father and son from Alabama. They asked me what I did for work, and I told them I was a writer, something I’d only recently started doing because I felt it was dishonest to call myself a writer when I’d never had anything published, never gotten any of my movie scripts made. 

They asked me what kind of writing I did, and in the list I mentioned that I’d almost gotten movie made, that there had been one scene filmed before the project went bust. They asked me what the movie was about. I was a little hesitant, and didn’t know how to describe it. How do you tell two middle-aged White guys from Alabama about the urban crime story you’ve written?  I described the main character in the movie and the basic storyline. They both suddenly looked very serious, like they’d instantly sobered up. They looked at each other silently for a long time. Then the son said, “That sounds just like my brother.”. 

I had written a Black crime drama that even appealed to middle-aged White guys from Alabama, but I didn’t know how to get it made (I did not yet realize that earlier that night, I had walked by a girl who knows). I made my way back to my room and crawled straight into bed. I was emotionally tired more than physically. Lost in it all was that that morning, I’d dropped off at the airport a long-time friend who had been with me at the beginning of the trip. After spending those last two days with him, I’d mentally severed my relationship with him after I’d come to accept what I’d always known but ignored—that he was an utterly amoral toxic human being, and that this combined with his intelligence made him dangerous. I was all but estranged from my family. And while I had gotten off of dialysis, I still didn’t really know if I was going to live or die. 

Laying there, I thought again about the girl I’d seen in the Aria lobby hours earlier. Though I’d felt it when I saw her, it was the first time I actually said to myself, “That was the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”. I still didn’t know who she was, but I thought, “She MUST be somebody important. I can find her...”

As I was reflecting on that moment when her eyes met mine, I realized that between the poem, and that encounter, the date, and the guys from Alabama, and everything else, I hadn’t checked my phone in hours. Back then, I was using the Facebook app, and if you’d had it open, when you turned on your phone, the first thing you would see would be the latest post from your newsfeed. When I turned it on, a familiar face filled the screen, beautiful eyes staring back at me from a sea of purple. It was one of the actresses on my friends list, an advertisement for a play she was in. I looked at her a long time, and then I thought, “No wait, THAT’S the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”. It was Ryan Michelle Bathe. 

In that moment, Ryan embodied everything that I’d wanted and lost. I was covered by expensive sheets in a luxurious suite in one of the most beautiful places in the world, but yet I felt like I had absolutely nothing. And that is how it happened that I cried myself to sleep in Room 37037 at the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada on the night I saw Scarlett Johansson. 

That is a true story. 

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