Chapter Eight: Life Existed Before Jimmy

Maybe it’s time I gave you a little background. You’ve had plenty of insight into my disastrous love life. Fast or famine, that’s me...

But before Jimmy, I was quite fun. I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore called Towson, which was made less dreary by the fact that there is a university there (and therefore all the hoopla that comes with college students) and that John Waters shot some of “Serial Mom” at my high school.

I was the middle child of three, with my siblings and I getting along just as well as siblings can and do, with no extraordinary tales of woe, deception or angst. My dad worked for a local brewery, and my mom stayed at home through most of my childhood, returning to part-time nursing when my younger sister was in school full-time. An average, all-American family.

My prom date has since gone on to law school, having decided that medicine was not for him. Over-educated, certainly, and probably still a really bad dancer.

I went off to NYU for a few semesters and transferred to UCLA to study film. I really thought I could learn all I would need to know about movie-making in college, but the truth is that while my parents were busting themselves to pay for tuition, rent and a car, I should have just started as a production assistant’s gofer and worked my way up.

After a four-year degree (cum laude, I might add) and a very impressive and expensive education, that’s where I started. My first day on the job, I broke the coffee machine. The PA found me in the production trailer, sitting on the floor in tears. It got better after that, but not much, so after a while, I ditched movie making for something less glamorous (ha): production finance.

The great thing about the film business is that you don’t actually need to be an accountant to go into finance. In fact, it’s better if you don’t know anything about bookkeeping. I was numerate and knew my way around a set, so it was an easy transition, and it led me straight to Jimmy. I entered my trailer one day, booted up my computer, and was faced with a question mark in place of a smiley Mac. Jimmy was the computer dude who fixed it.

He put his hand over mine to steer the mouse to show me some neat tricks I hadn’t known, and then left me his card. There was an instant ripple of anticipation. Of course, I called to thank him, because a computer geek is a useful friend to have. He asked me out, and the rest is clichéd history.

But between college and Jimmy, I went home frequently to see my family: the usual, Christmas or Thanksgiving. They rarely came out to see me, however, because my dad was too scared to face the freeways in California and my mother was a menace on the roads, so he wouldn’t drive with her.

They say (whoever “they” may be) that you should look at your parents’ relationship to figure out where you went wrong in yours, but to tell the truth, my folks seemed to get on just fine. Maybe that’s why Jimmy’s departure from an idyllic relationship caught me so off-guard.