Following up on the personal story that began last month in “A Hollywood Ending: Hopeful Reflections on a Failed Screenwriting Career,” here’s my take on whether we can ever truly go home again.
When I left my apartment of two decades in Los Angeles last spring, I knew it was the last time I’d ever see the place. I’d never really experienced that particular manner of finality before—walking away from a longtime home with full knowledge I would never again cast eyes upon it—because when I moved to L.A. from the Bronx in 2001, it was implicit I’d have ample occasion to return. My mother was here, after all, so it was still “Carlin homebase,” so to speak.
And, to be sure, I loved coming back for Christmas, and other sporadic occasions, to reconnect with the old hometown. It was and remains the only place in the world where I can strut down the avenue like Tony Manero on 86th Street in Bensonhurst, both master of all I survey yet somehow, simultaneously and incongruously, just another townie. I love that sensation—of belonging to a place so completely and so comfortably. When I walk down the streets of New York, I am home. And if that’s the standard for what home feels like, nothing else has ever come close—even L.A. after all that time.
After my screenwriting career abruptly ended in 2014, I spent the next several years nursing a quixotic fantasy in which I made my escape from L.A. both on a moment’s notice and without a backwards glance. Sleep tight, ya morons! Only trouble is, that’s like imagining yourself racing heroically into burning building to rescue someone trapped inside: It’s an easy scenario to envision when it’s purely hypothetical, unlikely to ever be put to the test.
But over the winter of 2021, from the point at which my wife and I initiated the purchase of our new apartment in the Bronx through the day we left California for good, I had a lot of time to say the long goodbye to L.A.—to come to terms with the idea that I actually was leaving. And throughout that six-month period, I couldn’t get Sean Penn’s elegiac soliloquy from State of Grace out of my head.
State of Grace is an obscure crime thriller from 1990 about the Irish-American street gangs that once ruled Hell’s Kitchen, New York. (The director, Phil Joanou, has made the entire film available on Vimeo free of charge and in high definition.) In it, Penn plays a character named Terry Noonan who grew up in the Kitchen and spent his youth running with the Westies, but who absconded, suddenly and unceremoniously, around age twenty. He told neither his best friend, Jackie (Gary Oldman), nor his girlfriend, Kathleen (Robin Wright); he just disappeared like a thief in the night, his whereabouts unknown.
The story opens with Terry returning to the Kitchen after a decade-long absence, picking up where he left off with Jackie and Kathleen and the Westies. This being a mob movie, I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say it ends tragically for just about every character, Terry included. “I thought some things,” Terry wistfully confesses to Kathleen in a scene preceding the movie’s blood-soaked climax. “That I could come back.” He goes on to explain his reasons for coming home, and how he assumed everything would be when he got there, once he’d reintegrated himself in the old neighborhood. He’d pictured it all so perfectly…
But it was only an idea. Had nothin’ to do with the truth, it’s just… a fuckin’ idea, like… you believe in angels, or the saints, or that there’s such a thing as a state of grace. And you believe it. But it’s got nothin’ to do with reality. It’s just an idea. I mean, you got your ideas and you got reality. They’re all… they’re all fucked up.
From State of Grace, written by Dennis McIntyre (with uncredited contributions from David Rabe)
Now, I don’t imagine it’ll surprise you to learn I was not involved with the criminal underworld when I lived in New York, nor did I slip away unannounced in the middle of the night without providing a forwarding address. Nonetheless, Terry’s lamentation played on a loop in my mind’s ear throughout that winter:
I thought some things… that I could come back.
State of Grace is about a guy who learns the hard way you can’t simply come home after all that time away and expect to just pick up where you left off; it’s a cautionary tale about what we expect versus how things actually are. Faced with the prospect of finally going home for good, I wondered: Is that even possible? Or was Thomas Wolfe right? Had I been carrying around a romantic notion of a happy homecoming that had nothing to do with reality?
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