My Winnie

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Dear Jessie,

I believe people deserve to know the truth—the truth of the impact they have had on the lives of others, the truth of how the people in their lives feel about them. It is the one gift I’ve wanted but never gotten, so I’m giving it to others. You first. I’ve been writing indirectly about you for a long time. The best writing I’ve done, I did while you were a part of my life, or on my mind, and that is not a coincidence. As a writer, I was always looking for a muse, and you were her. This is the truth I should have said a long time ago...

I always admired Nelson Mandela, the first Black president of South Africa. He died in 2013 while I was in jail awaiting trial. I’ve thought about Nelson Mandela often in the last seven years. At times, when I would look around at the ugliness of prison and think, “This is too tough for me,” I would remind myself that Nelson Mandela spent twenty years in prison. If he could handle twenty years in an inhumane South African prison, a few years in a California country club prison is nothing. I don’t even have the right to admire him if I can’t handle this. That’s what he would say. That’s what I told myself to get through it. 

But I knew there was a world of difference between him and me. He was fighting for a goal that everyone knew and a cause that most of the civilized people in the world knew was right. No one understood what I was fighting for, and fewer still (nobody actually) supported my fight. Everyone seemed to believe I’d suddenly become a villain. But the biggest difference that I always thought of when I thought of Mandela’s prison time was that he had his wife, Winnie, who believed in him and stood by him all those twenty years. If I’d had that, it would have been easy. Easy. 

It still amazes me, all the women I’ve known in my life, that not one girl wrote me or visited me in jail. Not one. Not one girl stood up to say, “Umm, I don’t think Michael would do that.”. None of the female bosses that I worked with every day for years. None of the girls from Stanford that I helped, whether they know it or not, to reach the positions they’ve reached in society. In court, every day, I would hope that one of the lawyers I had worked for would march in with her briefcase and win my trial. But no one came. Every day, for years on end, I would sit on my bunk and think, “Today will be the day I get a letter from...somebody.”.

I thought of a lot of people, a lot of things during all that time. I won’t lie to you and tell you it was only you. But as time went by, more and more the thought of you was my main reason for wanting to return to a world that I felt had completely turned its back on me. Out of all the girls I’ve known in my life, there was something different about you. This is the truth I want you to know. 

Love has never worked out for me. I have a “relationship autobiography” I’ve been working on forever, and originally, I was going to call it “Unlovable”, because that I was how I felt.  I felt that girls could find me pleasant, but that whatever it was that made girls fall in love with a man, it was just something I didn’t have.  I didn’t feel like a man at all, and in fact, I felt like a was below another girl on most women’s desirability scale! I guess that explains why most of the girls who do seem to like me a little bit have dabbled at being lesbians. 

But you confused me. You see, I would go to bars and nightclubs, and girls would look at me, far more than I thought they should. But when I started talking to them, most of the time, their apparent interest would go off like a light switch. But you actually seemed like you liked ME. And that was a totally new experience...well, almost totally new. There was one girl before you, but she changed. You didn’t. It seemed odd to me that you actually seemed to enjoy being around me. I definitely enjoyed being around you!

I took some artistic license in that poem I wrote about you on my old blog. I didn’t want you from the night we met in the Bahia ballroom. I think it was the night we went to see Atonement. I remember when I picked you up to go to the movie, glancing at you in my rearview mirror, and thinking, “OMG, she’s SOOO cute!”. 

It’s funny, perhaps because of my (misplaced) loyalty to Christy, I didn’t really notice how beautiful you were the first few times we met. I just noticed that I liked you. When I noticed how smoking hot you are, it was strange and shocking, because you don’t act like any smoking hot girl I know. A lot of hot girls are nice. You were one of the first that made me start to realize that the most beautiful women I knew were also the BEST women I knew. But I’ve never met a girl with your looks who is so cool and unselfconscious. I actually felt RELAXED around you, and to be able to feel that way around the hottest girl I’d ever seen, it was a unique and irreplaceable experience.

You never made me feel like I had to do or say some specific right thing. It just seemed like you enjoyed my company just like I enjoyed yours. You always made me laugh. You had the strangest, clever unique ways of looking at things. No relationship in my life ever felt so right, and that was what was so heartbreaking about the ways and reasons that things went wrong. Or at least what I believed were the reasons. 

So look, the elephant in the room, Christy. That is not a fat joke. I never should have dated Christy. We were incompatible and she was and probably still is a highly problematic person We were supposed to be a couple, and I was honest with her about everything, but she lied to me constantly. I knew this only because she was so bad at it. I have no idea what lies she might have gotten away with. In fact, it’s still a mystery to me how she managed to acquire such a great group of friends. Maybe that witchcraft she dabbled around in was working LOL. 

Christy probably told you all that I didn’t want to hang out with her friends, but that was because I couldn’t stand the way she treated ME around you guys. I spent the last year before I broke up with her trying to figure out if there was any way I could dump her and keep her friends. There is unfortunately no solution to that equation. Ordinarily, things said in the privacy of a relationship, I would take to my grave, but given Christy’s effort in assisting in getting me sent to prison, I will say that she used to say the most unflattering things about most of you behind your backs. I couldn’t understand it, because I loved you guys. If I could have only left Christy out of the equation somehow, I’d have been happily hanging out at Robin’s house with you and everyone else all the time. It was the kind of place I had been looking for. 

In time, I came to feel like you were the one girl I had met where, if we had both been single, things would have just worked out easily and perfectly, without any drama or runaround or bullshit that constitutes dating games. I would have said I liked you, you would have said you liked me, and we would have gotten down to enjoying life together. It seemed perfect, and I was mad at God, at the universe, at the world, that it seemed like a finally met a girl who wanted me like I wanted her and she had to be my girlfriend’s best friend, and a bad girlfriend at that. 

I’m an open-minded person, so I was curious about the idea that we talked about, but honestly, it was just a sign that I was with the wrong girl. Christy didn’t want it, I know that. I don’t think you really wanted it. But I wanted you, and I felt like you wanted me. You know, you’re the only girl about whom I feel I can actually make that statement—that you wanted me. Every other girl in my life always kept me wondering. I felt like you were always saying “I’m yours” even though you never said it.  I wish I’d said it to you-I’m yours. I wish I tried harder to figure out some way to make it work. Christy had not earned the loyalty that I gave her. And as far as that idea, if it was going to work, it wouldn’t have worked with her.

Christy had another friend, also named Christy. Did you ever meet her?  I don’t think you two knew each other. The idea of getting the two of you in the same room is about the hottest thing I can think of next to getting Scarlett Johansson and Amanda Seyfried in the same room. Hotter than that, actually, because I know you two.  I think you would have liked each other a lot. Maybe there’s a universe somewhere...Anyway...

I don’t normally like to write stuff like this, but since I’m telling the truth here, I actually have to go ahead and tell it. Sex was never the most important thing in the world for me. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I like it. I found it comically frustrating that you could make me think about sex more than I ordinarily did. Of course, I was sexually attracted to the girls I loved, but the girls I loved were never the girls that I found most attractive in that way. To me, while sex can be a transcendent experience when it is done right (it so rarely is), the most important aspect of love was spending time together...emotional and intellectual bonding that becomes a physical bond. But you...OMG...

I wanted to make love to you SOOO badly that there are words to describe it. There was like a physical force that I could feel even standing two feet away from you, pulling me toward you. It wasn’t until you were gone that I realized, “Hey wait, she must have felt that, too!  The laws of physics require it.”.  I’ve traveled a lot of places, destinations where rich guys take their model girlfriends, places where these Hollywood girls I’m writing about hang out, and you were the smoking hottest girl I ever saw anywhere. Number one. And it wasn’t close. 

I remember that night we went out in Vegas and you were wearing the silver sequin top. We went to the then-new Aria that night, and I remember looking at you smiling in the lobby, standing in almost the exact same spot where I saw Scarlett Johansson almost exactly two years later, and thinking that it seemed as if that place was built as a monument to your beauty. And then when I saw Scarlett, I thought she looked like the person who built it. That weekend with you, in a city filled with rich guys and their hot girls, every guy was looking at you. You were the most beautiful girl in town, as would be the case for the most beautiful girl in the world. 

I feel like I should explain myself for Vegas. I wanted to be with you, pure and simple. But I was raised to believe I have an obligation to do the right thing, and I take it seriously. I knew it wasn’t the right thing, as much as I wanted it. It wasn’t just because of Christy. That first night we went out, on our way back to the hotel, I looked at you in the back seat. You were texting on your phone, and at first, I thought it was just the glow from your phone illuminating your face. But then I realized it wasn’t the phone giving you that glow—it was the person you were texting. I had no idea who it was. At that moment, I didn’t know there was anyone else in your life. But I asked myself, if I was the person on the other end of that phone, how would I feel about the situation we were in?  I decided that I couldn’t try to take you away from that person when I already had a girlfriend, even an inadequate one. 

Growing up with a preacher for a father, of course I’ve read the Bible a lot. I was always fascinated by the story of King David and his future wife Bathsheba who he saw bathing from the roof of his palace and subsequently had her husband murdered to cover up his affair with her. This story bothered me, because the Bible gives such glowing praise of King David, and I considered what he did in that situation to be unforgivable, and I thought this even as a child. But I was named after him, so I could never forget about it...

Being a boy, I’d often wondered how hot Bathsheba must have been to make a king risk his kingdom. It’s funny, even before we met, I imagined her as looking a lot like you. I remember standing in that golden bathroom in Trump Tower, a room fit for a king, and looking at you standing in front of me and thinking, “There’s no way Bathsheba was this hot!”. But I didn’t touch you, even though I’ve never wanted anything in my life more, because I knew there would be consequences. I couldn’t be that weak—David is my MIDDLE name. 

Later, I felt a terrible fear that you might have thought that I didn’t think you were good enough for me because you’d told me about your old job the day before. In fact, knowing more about you only made me love you more. After you told me your story, had we been alone, I’d have gone to the drive-thru chapel with you and married you right then. But as Nas said, you deserve Cinderella’s ball. I hope you had it. I was worried for a minute, but finally I guess the decision that I made was validated because you got married. 

So now, I’m writing this blog and making my pitch to Scarlett Johansson (maybe you’ve heard of her). I feel like a dope now because I just found out yesterday she’s been engaged for over a year, and I didn’t know. So the rule I was worried about breaking with you, I broke by accident. The irony kills. Hell is the place where you get to see the wedding photos of all the girls you love, but you aren’t in any of them. Thanks, internet!

But I say that Scarlett took the title of most beautiful woman I’ve seen from you in Vegas. It’s funny to me that it happened in the same building, and that night I saw Scarlett, literally when I saw her, I was walking around working on a poem about our weekend in Vegas together.  I say Scarlett won, but it wasn’t really a fair contest. By that night I was there with you, we’d known each other four years. Scarlett had the advantage of being able to shock me since I’d never seen her before (I actually didn’t recognize her that night). But what if the two of you were both strangers, and you’d both walked in front of me that night, and if you also had $500 million to get yourself dolled up, who would I have noticed first?  I don’t know.  It’s pretty close. I haven’t seen you in ten years. I saw Scarlett eight years ago. I’ll let her keep the title for now. But there’s one interesting title you hold that she cannot take...

This is really embarrassing to talk about, but I think you should know. So, I very rarely have dreams about sex. Almost never, and when I do, I usually wake right up quicker than from a nightmare. As a boy growing up, I heard about “wet dreams” but I actually never had one. When I went to jail, I refrained from masturbating for more than twenty months. Why? There is no privacy (I was living in a dorm with 39 people). Jail is dirty, disgusting and I’m surrounded by nothing but dudes. What is there to get turned on by?

When I was transferred to prison, 20+ months into my sentence, I was in a cell at first. Having all the noise and chaos of being surrounded by so many people finally eliminated, I felt a little more at peace despite how badly things had gone. One morning, I had a dream about you. We were getting married and you were standing there in a white dress looking so beautiful. I started to wake up and I thought about Vegas when you came out wearing that frilly black dress. You were the smoking hottest thing I’ve ever seen, still to this day. You didn’t wear it out, I guess because you didn’t have the right shoes or something. Or maybe you decided the world couldn’t handle it. In my dream, I called you over and whispered in your ear exactly what I wanted, which involved peeling that dress off of you and...other things. Just as I was half-dreaming half-awake, my nearly twenty-one months without having an orgasm came to an abrupt end. I came in my bed. That’s how smoking hot you are—you are my one and only wet dream, and I was just TALKING to you in it. 

During those five years I was locked up, you were my strongest reason for wanting to get back to the world. I thought, maybe I’d get out and find you were single and maybe we could have a second chance. I thought about the girl I’d seen in Vegas, who I didn’t think was Scarlett back then, but I felt little hope of ever seeing her again. I just saw her face looking at me sternly when I thought about giving up. 

While I was in jail, you saved a lot of mens’ lives, probably. There were times when people were acting like belligerent idiots, and I thought to myself, “There’s nothing left for me in the world. I’m going to grind this dude up and leave him where I found him”. But then I would remember that you were still out there, and there were good reasons not to throw my life away just yet. 

I would lay on my bunk daydreaming about all the little moments I spent with you. Especially that one dance at the Luxor. And I hate dancing. But I didn’t hate it with you. I replayed every moment wondering what might have happened if I’d said or dome something different. I mentioned all the girls who didn’t write or visit me. You didn’t either, but somehow it felt different, like you were there. You were always on my mind, and if you hadn’t been, the odds of my doing something stupid would have been far higher. Like Nelson Mandela’s Winnie, you were there. Even the structural similarity of your names can’t escape my notice. 

When I got out of prison, and I saw that you had graduated from college, I felt so proud of you. You told me on the phone you wanted to do it, and you did it. I wanted to call you, to send you a note, something. But because I saw you had gotten married, I didn’t feel like I should, because I didn’t think I’d be able to resist making you an offer to be with me.  But I was happy to see you’d gotten married. It made me feel better about letting you go. 

I should have said something. I guess I’m too old-fashioned about stuff like that. People who are married should know what options they have, I guess. Maybe you were looking for an exit. But I never wanted to be disrespectful in that way. When I offered to try to get your husband a photography job years ago, I meant it. I’d looked at his photos and they were good, which was one of the little things I decided to gamble on, and hey, I guessed it worked out. You finally made an honest man out of him! LOL

For years, it was always my fantasy that the girl I loved at any moment would show up at my door with a suitcase and say she was here to stay. There was no one where I hoped for that more than with you.  My life is literally destroyed right now. I’m still fighting a legal battle (I just spent another month in jail AGAIN and just got out last week). I lost everything I own. I’m technically homeless even though I’m writing this from a nice hotel room today. I don’t really have anything to offer now. 

I don’t necessarily know if I believe in heaven or anything like that. I guess I believe more than I used to. I definitely believe in hell—these last seven years have been it. But though no one seems to know it, I’ve tried to be the best person I could be every step of the way.  So now it looks like my Scarlett long-shot dreams won’t come true, and I’m back to feeling unlovable again, and kicking myself for refusing to break a few little rules for the girl who felt most right. I don’t know what the future holds, but as far as I’m concerned, whether or not I ever get to meet or work for or even marry Scarlett, if this life isn’t all there is, God owes me a lifetime with you. Or else this whole trying to be a good person thing is just a rip-off. I’ll wait. Next time, I don’t want to meet you when we’re 30-something. I don’t even want to be your high-school sweetheart. I want to be your ELEMENTARY school sweetheart! You know, if you want to...

But there is a project I want to work on with you in this life, whether or not I ever get to make love to you, which I admit is still very near the top of the list of things I dream of doing in my life. But maybe higher than that, is that I want to be able to tell your story, your real story. I think it is important. People need to hear it and it could be an inspiration to so many girls. And I believe we could make a lot of money. I’ve been thinking of the movie possibilities. The only problem is, I can’t find an actress with the right look smoking hot enough to play you! Maybe Lucy Hale would do.  This girl in this Kyleena commercial looks like she could play you...if she can act. Oh, that is Lucy Hale. And I actually just say another actress that might work. But I so desperately want to reconnect with you if only for this reason. And now that it looks like I won’t be able to marry Scarlett, I don’t have to worry about her not wanting me to do it. 

Maybe I don’t need help from Scarlett. I can put together another movie project on my own, this time with you and without the clowns I was working with before. But I need you do be able to do it. You are a hero. Your story has to be told. There is no one more qualified for this job than me. If you can find this blog, you can email me and I’ll send you my phone number. My email is my whole name, first middle and last, @gmail.com. Hearing your voice again would be one of the great moments of my life. And seeing you again...

I get bored a lot, because I’m finished thinking things through when everyone else is still working on it. So I leave breadcrumbs behind, things that I hope people will remember, so later I can explain. I’ve been doing this for years. I know you used to read my Facebook and I wrote on there back at the end of 2011 “All I want for Christmas is 14,763”. I don’t know if you saw it. I hoped you would, because it was a message to you, and it meant that all I wanted was to see you again. Huh?

I’m weirder than people know. Years ago, a friend asked me why I never looked at the menu in restaurants. I’d never thought about it, but once I’d been to a place, I remembered the menu. I’d start flipping through it in my mind in the car. But I was self-conscious about it.  I wanted to be like everyone else. So I started pretending to read menus for what seemed an appropriate amount of time. 

I have this huge vault of images in my mind. Imagine a huge warehouse that goes on and on in every direction, with filmstrips hanging from the ceiling. I think of something, the strips with images of those things sort of light up. Years ago, I read a book by an autistic genius named Daniel Tammet. In his book, he talked about seeing large numbers as images in his head. I was fascinated by it because, while I would do some things that he and others could do, this seemed mysterious to me. I spent hours in the bookstore looking at his drawing of the mathematical constant pi and trying to understand what he was doing. 

Then, in October of 2011, while I was working on my new physics theory and struggling with the part if it that involves pi, I heard a number in my head, “14,762”. What was it?  I tried everything, dates, numerology, prime numbers, it didn’t make any sense. I’d gone to the bookstore to look at Daniel Tammet’s drawings again, and then, when I had given up trying to understand what Daniel Tammet had done, I saw your face in my mind, and I understood. To make math easier,  he was assigning additional symbols to larger numbers. That was how I learned base-infinity math. Then I knew what that number was.

I didn’t believe it at first. But then, I started to count more carefully and I realize it was right: from when I looked over my left shoulder toward the gold-leaf ceiling of the Bahia ballroom, to the 112 times I glanced over at you during Atonement, to the time you asked Christy to stop asking you about your mother—the only time I ever really saw you angry, to how beautiful you looked when I wiped the mascara off your cheek standing in the lobby of Trump Tower, to the look you gave me on Cinco de Mayo standing by the bar in The Office that stopped time, until I looked over the roof of my car to see you standing on the curb at the airport the last time I saw you, it was 14,762 times that I looked at your face. 

I love you, Jessie. I will always love you. You were my Winnie. 

Michael

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