Column 3 – This is what happens when your life goes to pieces.
Originally published by reimagine.me
Photography: Shannon Cottrell

IN THE PREVIOUS installment of “First-Time Dad at 50”, I told you how it seemed like a miracle that I eventually got my shit together enough to meet the mother of my just-turned-six-months-old baby girl, Olivia, the one who launched me into the growing ranks of old dads.

I ended that column by declaring that before all that could happen, I had to die first.

Okay, so that was a bit dramatic. Obviously, I didn’t die. But I did get divorced and the decision to part ways with my first wife may not have killed me, but it did seem to invite the fickle fingers of fate to pull apart the threads of my life in ways that often felt like death.

The good news is that all that unspooling led to where I am right now, which is returning from a walk around the block as my baby girl falls asleep on my shoulder to my humming of Led Zeppelin’s “The Ocean.” This is our nightly ritual, and believe me when I say, I would have hopped through hell barefoot to get to this place.

At times, it felt like that’s exactly what I did. It all started when my ex-wife and I decided to consciously uncouple long before Gwyneth Paltrow started dispensing advice on how millionaires could live a more farm-to-table lifestyle.

To this end, we turned over the business of our divorce to a New Age, Westside bottle blond who, through the magic of a “transformational mediation practice” and a vaguely Hindu-ish name, promised to turn our dissolving marriage from an adversarial confrontation into a “win-win.”

In this case, the win-win meant I had to sell my house—a 1923 Spanish-style cottage with a big yard I had snatched from under the real-estate bubble just in time to be affordable. From the way it was remodeled, landscaped and inhabited, this was literally a dream house. It reflected a life I imagined us living.
Then, suddenly, it belonged to someone else’s imagination.

It’s weird to one day be in your dream house and the next to find yourself in a different, perfectly good, utilitarian house, that communicates no dream other than to collect renters’ checks. Then, there’s the matter of skulking through a strange supermarket in a new neighborhood walking the aisles with people who you don’t recognize, but who you are sure recognize that you are one sad sack.
But at least I still had my dogs! Willa and Rocco.

Willa, a 60-pound Belgian Shepherd who sounded like a hound from hell when she didn’t recognize your footsteps, but who was actually the sweetest, smartest, fur-covered-soul in the world. And Rocco, a big, dumb, smiling lug of a Rhodesian Ridgeback who attacked me and Willa on the street one day with kisses and licks while his fur teemed with fleas and his cuts and scrapes oozed infection. I took him home and made him mine.

I had them, that is, until my landlord told me I could keep just one dog.

Suddenly, I was living a canine version of Sophie’s Choice. I decided it was only fair to keep Willa since she was there first and eventually found a possible taker for Rocco—a rich lady who lived on top of a mountain in Malibu. Her dogs dined on freshly butchered, organic meat, which meant they ate better than 90 percent of the rest of the world. First, though, Rocco had to pass an audition.

I drove up the hill in a steady, slow rain in January, the day before my 44th birthday. A wildfire had burned almost everything in sight. The mountainside looked like a Tim Burton sketch. A few black, leafless trees popped up like skeletons. The rich lady’s estate was somehow untouched.

The rich lady was nice. Her gardener drove Rocco around the property on a golf cart. She put out some organic meat and Rocco liked it. Audition passed. I drove away with Rocco getting smaller in my rearview mirror while I cried like a baby.

But at least I still had my dream job as one of the top editors at my favorite local rag, the LA Weekly. Or, I did until the axe that eventually fell on everybody who wasn’t part of the new company finally fell on me, too.

Okay, so my wife, house, dog and job had rapidly disappeared into the vortex that was becoming my middle-aged reality. But at least I had my health.

Or, I thought I did until my doctor called on my birthday. His gift was a PSA (Prostate-Specific Antigen) reading that was so severe he booked me with an urologist the next day. The Internet offered no relief, informing me that when a PSA count accelerates from near zero to the number I had, cancer is not only likely, but it’s also likely to be widespread and aggressive.

I got in the shower and cried for the second time in two days.

At the birthday party I had planned for that evening, I went around the table at the restaurant and kissed and hugged my friends. They’d grown used to my sentimentality by now, but were slightly bewildered by this display.

The next day, I found myself at Tower Urology next to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Third Street in West Hollywood, where the eateries and pubs on the south side of the street fight valiantly to project warmth and invitation against the shadows cast by the institutional medical structures lining the north side. The facility’s waiting room, of course, was cold and fluorescent. Everybody looked to be about 20 years older than I was. What the hell are you doing here? I asked my reflection in the mirror hanging above the doorway.

If the cosmic joke was at all lost on me at first, it was fully revealed when the urologist’s assistant wheeled in the device with which he’d be taking pictures of my prostate. The thing looked like a gag dildo someone might bring to a bachelorette party.“Don’t worry,” he said in all seriousness, “this will only take about five minutes.” I had to either laugh or cry. I laughed. The pain was so extreme, it became a curiosity.

When it was finally over, the doctor met me in a charmless hallway holding images of my prostate. “Congratulations,” he said, looking at the pictures, “you have the prostate of a teenager. It’s beautiful.”

A few days later I got the news that my PSA counts were back to normal. I wasn’t going to die, not yet.

But I was starting to be reborn.