She was nuts. She left L.A. She remained nuts. So she came back.
I don't believe the whole "there are no accidents" cliché. Distracted drivers hitting things, people dropping things, Gigli: all accidents. But when certain people keep showing up in my life, it can't simply be due to an excess of randomness. The best I can figure is that such people satisfy some need that we have. Within our limited understanding of how the universe works, however, I can't possibly imagine why the universe has run me into Robin Brickner so many times.
The first time I met Robin, around 1994, she was sitting outside a coffeehouse in Studio City with a friend of hers. I only remembered her habit of twirling a lit cigarette end-over-end between her fingers. I stared hard at it and couldn't understand how she didn't burn herself. A couple of years later, I met another woman outside another Studio City coffeehouse with the same cigarette-twirling habit. It was Robin. If not for that habit, I would never have known it was her.
Robin, as it turned out, was dating a guy named Rafael, a guy I knew from another circle of friends. In that group, then, I would occasionally run into Robin repeatedly for the next few years, including one afternoon in my neighborhood near my apartment in Sherman Oaks. The two of them were riding around in his car, looking for a house under construction in which they could spend the night. I don't think they were homeless, I think they just liked doing stuff like that.
Eventually, by the late 90s, Robin had finally ended what had been a miserable relationship with Rafael so she could enjoy the trappings of misery entirely on her own. In that time, she and I hung out more. No dating, no sex, just hanging out. It was during our times alone together that I became more familiar with her unthreatening and gentle comportment, betrayed only by a laugh that exploded into a half-cackle that, looking back, may have been a sign of mental instability. My most vivid recollection about our time together was that we complained a lot, which, looking back, may have been a sign of that whole "misery loves company" cliché.
Naturally, she blamed her unhappiness on Los Angeles, so she set out to live in other cities. Already depressed and lonely, the isolation she experienced elsewhere only intensified her feelings, which were soon compounded by paranoia. Shortly after she moved to Denver, the Columbine High School massacre occurred. Convinced that bad things followed her around, she moved to Chicago, where she thought the Japanese businessmen checking her out on the subway wanted to rape her. It didn't help matters that when she moved to New York, 9/11 happened. (I remember her telling me that, at first, she didn't realize what had happened. She was heading downtown for a job interview while everyone else was walking the other direction. She thought the reason people were crying was because the subway trains were out of service.)
And in all of these places, she had a hard time making friends. I think I was her only friend. We used to communicate by emails in which she would expound upon her misery and tell me she hoped to find a job. For some reason, she usually spelled "job" W-O-B. Wob. "Everything will be okay once I find a wob."
After 9/11, she'd had enough of other cities and came back here to L.A., all but begging me to spend time with her. We did, a few times, all casual. I saw her more often than some of my much closer friends. Then I got an email with the header "Robin last letter." Minus her opening rambling paragraph about how intolerant "the Americas" were toward her, the letter read:
So I'm sorry if I insulted the Americas, this is a grand country, I'm just a little koo koo and bitter. Thanks for the jogging lessons and all those years of wonderful email interactions. Too bad your psychologist friend didn't tell you that I may have been manic depressive three years ago, but no one and nothing is perfect. And maybe you didn't know her three years ago. [I'd told Robin about my psychologist friend's armchair analysis of her, based on my description.] Inleast [sic] I feel better right now. Hope your [sic] having a nifty time. Hope your [sic] enjoying the holidays.
I sometimes wonder if you just wanted to show me how great you were doing and then drop me as some form of sick and twisted revenge, or maybe you just came to the conclusion that it was best for all of us, the universe included, that we should never speak. I just don't know. Have a groovy new year buddy. Keep doing what you love, the acting and the writing, never give up on the stuff you dig on, dig?
Bye
At that moment, I finally figured out how this generally agreeable but hypersensitive woman ended up with no friends. She probably sent letters like this to everyone. I was also wondering how a then-33-year-old guy with a dead-end job, little confidence in himself, and no girlfriend could be considered "great."
Frankly, I was kind of glad to be rid of her. She was somewhat pathetic. Nothing in her life was going right, she didn't know what to do about it, and there was no end in sight. She was a female version of me when I was 26. Why would I want to hang out with that?
In the intervening years, I rarely thought about her. What I thought about had more to do with who I was when I was friends with her. I'm glad I was no longer that kind of person, the kind of person who would indulge whatever brand of lunacy anyone cared to share. (Now I seek out lunatics for much healthier reasons.)
***
Monday, I walked into a coffeehouse and the woman in line ahead of me... was Robin. I hadn't seen her since that email, the one where she told me, possibly her only friend, to go away.
"Hi." She was prettier than she was four years ago.
"Hi."
"How have you been?" She still had that gentle, unthreatening way of speaking.
"Oh fine, fine."
"You wanna... ?" She gestured that we take a seat.
"Yeah, yeah."
We found a table in the patio. As soon as we sat down, she pulled out a little tube of Advil and turned it sideways to pour some into her tea. A whitish powder came out.
"That's not Advil, is it?"
"No, it's an organic sugar from a plant. I forgot the name of it."
"Oh. I thought you needed ground-up... "
"Yeah, I need Advil really bad!" She let out that explosive half-cackle again.
Throughout the conversation, at least five times, she opened up that little tube and sprinkled more sugar into her tea. I can't say it wasn't really sugar, but I noticed that every time she stirred it in, it never dissolved.
"I was just thinking about you on the drive over," she said, adding that she'd only planned to come here and people-watch today. I could totally relate on the people-watching part.
It looked like she'd lost about 15 pounds. That roundish face had lengthened a bit. And she had a real hairdo. She looked like Claire Danes. She never did before.
She mentioned that she got her master's degree in education, but joked that it wasn't that impressive since she got it from National University. After a while, I noticed that she hadn't lit a cigarette yet. I guessed that she'd quit smoking. She told me she had.
But the more she talked, the more I realized that she was no longer the miserable wretch I once knew. The woman had clearly gotten help in the last four years. She explained that since she started therapy, she learned that during that time she was traveling from city to city, she had had trouble finding anyone to talk to and that just made her depression worse. The only ironic moment came when I mentioned a mutual friend, Kim. Robin said she liked Kim, but called her "a little dramatic."
The one thing left for me was to ask her about her farewell email. Was it too soon to bring that up yet? Would her feelings get mortally wounded like they did in the past over the slightest thing? I wasn't seeking any kind of closure to our friendship. I wasn't even looking for her to take accountability for blowing me off. I just wanted to point it out to her to see what she'd say. An apology? An explanation? A look back with laughter? I had no idea, but it went like this:
"I'm trying to remember why we stopped hanging out," I said.
"You stopped hanging out with me."
"Nnnnoooo... I think you sent me an email. It had something like 'Robin last letter' in the subject line."
"No I didn't."
"Hmm. I'm pretty sure you did. You said you were upset that we weren't hanging out enough."
"Oh. Maybe I did."
Then we talked about other things. We exchanged phone numbers and agreed to talk more another time.
On the one hand, I wonder how much I'd want to hang out with a person whose greatest common bond with me is the mutual misery we used to share. On the other hand, I have an accidental history with this woman that goes back over a decade, a woman to whom I'm not attracted, who has no apparent skills or connections that could possibly help my career, who doesn't interest, challenge, or excite me any more than plenty of other people in my life already do, and probably feels the same way about me on all those fronts.
So why do I keep running into her?
L.A. Nuts is a weekly look at the cast of characters that make up this city.
