Find Me I'm Yours (20 page)

And this one—the bagel angle is a clever departure, right?!

Well, BIG and GIANT would be good things—at least I'd be able to SEE them until I had a chance to go scour thrift shops to find a pair of glasses that had a similar prescription to mine, and were cute enough too, of course, AND under $2.00. FUCK, should I go back and get my paycheck today? I couldn't deal with seeing Coco, so I decided to go in on Monday when she was out of town. Maybe by then Malcolm would have even cooled off, and he'd offer me my job back.

My email swooshed, so I checked and found five new messages. The first three were confirmations from the places I had registered for my wedding. The fourth was delightful spam, “URGENT! Bigger pen!s stimulates more nerve endings in female vag!na”(I wonder what it does to the male vag!na?), and the fifth's subject line was even more exciting than number four's promise. It simply said: HI MAGGI!

I'd recognize that spelling anywhere. It was from my sister in solidariti—SANDI STERN! I clicked it open immediateli.

Things were starting to look a bit more super-er! I wrote her back, using lots of emoticons.

I know. I should have said, “Keep an ‘i' out for us.”

DAY 8—AFTERNOON

There are all these sightseeing vans on Mulholland with the tops sliced off like a can opener got to them, filled with understandably naïve tourists who actually believe THIS is the best vantage point to take pictures of the Hollywood sign.

Some locals know better, and have found THIS spot:

Whenever I take Boo and Toupee up there on a hike, I am constantly stopped by people with thick, intriguing accents who are trying to find their way closer to the sign. I never knew how to actually get up right to it until I found this totally cool hand-illustrated map an artist created that shows the exact route. Check it out:

www.HollywoodSignCloseUp.com
.

Luckily I was behind several of these misguided vans. Because they go so slow, no one honked at me OR flipped me off!

I parked in the lot in between two monster trucks (what are the odds of that?!) and headed to the upper gate of Runyon Canyon.

This was the first thing I spotted when I walked in:

And I suddenly did. This was a feeling that, through the years, would wash over me now and then, but mostly then. I had learned from a very young age to detach from my dad. To keep my desire to see him and know him at an arm's length, and to never expect a thing from him, especially after he moved to San Francisco and started a new family. Cooper and I have a half brother and sister that we've never even met. After Dad left Mom, there was a quiet period. But a couple of years later, he started reaching out a lot, wanting to see me, and know Cooper. By then he was already a stranger, and I was still pissed off at him for leaving us all, so I pushed him away further through the years. Mom had to raise us on her own, and although she never showed it, I always felt the resentment bubbling beneath her independent-lady surface.

FUCK. MOM! I forgot to call her back after the hilaria she overheard on the phone in the morning. I dialed, but there was no reception in the canyon. I'd have to remember to call her later.

I hiked for almost two hours. Down and up the trails looking everywhere. If I saw blurs of brown from afar, I'd hurry to get closer. But no dog with a polka-dot tongue. No Mr. WTF. I did, however, see a man who had so much sweat glistening on his furry eyebrows he looked like a polar bear thawing out. And another guy with an unfortunate placement of brown flowers printed on the seat of his white shorts. Not a pretty sight.