My name is DC Pierson. I'm a novelist, actor, and comedian. I wrote the novels THE BOY WHO COULDN'T SLEEP AND NEVER HAD TO and CRAP KINGDOM. My comedy group DERRICK made the movie MYSTERY TEAM.
One morning when I was fifteen, after I’d been up all night because it was summer vacation, I decided to experiment momentarily with what it might be like not to believe in God. I sat at the kitchen table and looked out the back window of our house, and the fleeting euphoria of staying up all night combined with our nice backyard bathed in nice sunrise-y light combined with the thought that all this might be possible without some omniscient universal consciousness who could loom up in my mind and judge me for watching scrambled porn channels to give me something like a religious experience, or the negative image of one, with all the colors reversed like the porn on the scrambled channels, but the same effect.
I felt emboldened by my newfound atheism so when my dad came out to get ready for work I told him about it.
“An atheist, huh?” he said. “I could understand being agnostic. But atheism… I dunno.” There was very little judgement in his voice. It was more like I had made a choice of car color he was pretty sure I’d come to regret later but hey, it felt flashy for now so more power to me and maybe I’d like it forever as much as I did the day I took it off the lot.
Now it is a little more than seventeen years later and I want to say to him, Are you happy now, you bastard, you Joni Mitchell superfan, you endurer of tremendous loss who somehow kept us all more or less on the road, you early adopter, you excellent text messenger, you with the running joke of answering ‘older than dirt’ when asked how old you were turning on your birthday even though I think you might have been the age I am now when I was first old enough to voice the set-up to the joke, you gangly medium-long-haired teen in pictures we go through as we are cleaning out the garage, you quiet example, you reason I now resent every paunchy golf-shirted male baby boomer easing into retirement and reminiscing over rock’s lost ubiquity and undiminished superiority because you earned your place among their circle of folding chairs at the tailgate but you will not be joining, you easiest person for me to find a gift for, you pile of ashes in a box on my stepmom’s dresser, you battery of optimism that never dipped below ninety-eight percent, you who we still say goodnight to when the lights in what was your home go out cued by timers you set, you apparently actually good golfer? I’m pretty sure I’m an agnostic, and possibly more, and all for the corniest and least philosophical of reasons: the off-chance of seeing you again.
Last year my writing partners Dan Meggie and I started shadowing this high school robotics team as part of research for a movie. The project ultimately dissolved and we had a real "wait a minute... this was something we were doing for ourselves... now it's something that we're doing to help... the youth?" sort of Mighty Ducks moment. Anyway, it's been insanely rewarding to help the kids make videos. They're smart and earnest and make me less freaked out about the future.
Their league has a (wonderfully endearingly dorky) song parody competition and our team's video "MY BOT" is in the semi-finals. Only three percent separate us and the next closest video so if you have a Twitter account, please vote for "MY BOT" and help 'em out. Only 24 hours left and it's gonna be a squeaker so your vote would help immensely.
Sure, it's depressing to think of all the music you'd love if you heard but you'll never hear, but on the other hand, think of all the music you'd hate that you'll never hear!
Apparently you can write NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS on mail addressed to people who used to live in your apartment unit but don’t anymore, and drop it back in a mailbox. I thought you were just supposed to hang onto it and let it weigh on you, like everything else.
This is a small David Bowie thing meant to be another David Bowie thing in the rapidly expanding star-cloud of David Bowie things.
Early on in college I babysat in Brooklyn. My first day babysitting a six-year-old named Gabe, we were sitting and coloring. I was probably thinking something about how pure and child-like coloring was, and how it was just a ton like improv, a thing I was learning and just as quickly becoming insufferable about at the time.
After a long time of us both being quiet, Gabe asked, “Who’s your favorite singer?”
“Elvis Costello,” I said, doing the most important thing you can do day one of a new babysitting job: establishing hipster cred. “Who’s yours?”
“DAVID BOWIE!” Gabe said.
Outcooled by a 6 year old. Truly this was Brooklyn.
Gabe hopped off the stool and returned to the kitchen counter seconds later where we were coloring with a big floppy black CD binder. In it were all the 70’s Bowie albums.
Gabe told me, “This is mine.”
I said, and meant, that this possession of his was awesome. We put on Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars.
As it played and we kept coloring, I thought, Oh, of course a six year old would like David Bowie. It’s so theatrical and visual, even just on record. At a time in your life when your imagination is as overpowered as it’s ever going to be, Bowie’s music would be like this audio accelerant.
Sometimes when I’m listening to music and doing a certain kind of task, this space opens up in my brain between the two things. It feels like a physical space, a room or something. Sometimes it’s an imaginary place, sometimes it’s a hallway in my high school. It’s weird and I don’t know why it happens. It happened that day because of course it did. And listening through the ears of a six-year-old, that space seemed wider than it ever had before.
That’s where David Bowie lives. He lives in a space in your head that is sometimes memory and sometimes completely made-up, a space that opens up between his music and you drawing, between him expressing himself and you expressing yourself. He doesn’t stop inside your head. He continues directly through you.
My girlfriend was pushing this infant she babysits in a stroller in the park, and I met up with them so she could hand off our house keys. I walked with them for a little while along the lake.
We passed by a friend of mine, but I didn’t notice him until it was too late to do anything but wave.
That friend, who I don’t see very often, probably thinks we have a baby now.
A few years ago, Dan Eckman and Meggie McFadden from DERRICK and I started developing my first book, THE BOY WHO COULDN'T SLEEP AND NEVER HAD TO, as a feature film.
Today we're debuting this proof-of-concept short to get people excited and attract financing, so if you like it, please share it all over the dang place.
I was walking last night and it was beautiful outside. The wind had kicked up some wonderful distillation of everything great about being outdoors at night.
When I lived in New York it was standard operating procedure for me to look up at nice apartments and think about how great the lives of the people living there must be (not necessarily more stable, but certainly sexier and more interesting), and I do a similar thing in LA, but now it has less to do with how much better their lives are per se, but more just how different they are. The way you step into someone's house or apartment for the first time, and it smells very distinct, and there's a design scheme working, and you think, they've really got a whole thing going, haven't they?
I generate all that when I look over at a nice little house set back behind some hedges, architecturally specific windows glowing away in the middle of a rich and emotionally loaded darkness.
My life, on the whole, is very good, and I realized at some point that the longing I have when I walk around and look at nice houses or apartments has less to do with status envy and more to do with mortality. I'm never going to be anybody who lives in that house or apartment, in the little world (that probably bears little to no resemblance to the actual one) I've auto-spawned in my brain in a millisecond. I would like to be. There's that Ace Of Base song "Beautiful Life" where she said "I just want to be anybody," and once in a grocery store I misheard it as "I just want to be everybody," and I thought, that's me.
I just want to be everybody.
And when I was walking last night, on a street that's full of beautiful little houses and unique and wonderful-to-look-at apartment buildings (not too far from my house, because as I said, my life is very good) I thought, you know, once I would've looked at that house and thought, I wish I live there.
And my brain responded: You do live there.
It was a corny moment of (unearned) universal consciousness, but I was made very happy by it for minutes afterward, thinking, I live there! And there! And there! I drive that car and that car and that one! That's my tree! That is MY outdoor cat! Look at all the wonderful places I live! I AM everybody! When I go to the grocery store later I will see a bunch of the other people I am, and it will be great!
And it was. It was a heady, silly couple of minutes, but it felt like a night and a place to let myself think heady silly things, things that I actually do kind of find emotionally resonant, but things you can also find yourself being self-deprecating about in the harsh, irony-drenched light of day.
But there I was, walking up this nice street on a night that was the best kind of night, dark and cold and windy but friendly instead of scary, and I knew I was everybody.
Then I tripped.
It was the really dumb kind of tripping, where you land odd on an irregular piece of sidewalk, and you overcorrect to catch yourself, and you must look really idiotic from a passing car.
And I felt extra-idiotic, and laughed at myself, because I thought, you can catch all these great big feelings from the evening air and the wind and the momentum that comes from walking fast, and you can feel at one with the universe, but you're still you, and you still trip, honestly, like every tenth step.
And then I realized: I didn't trip.
We all tripped.
You hear that? You tripped. You all tripped last night on the street.
It was an arms race between the two of them, seeing who could unearth pictures of the most obscure era, the corner of the past — past pop culture, past fashion — that seemed most indisputably like the past. They both subscribed to Twitter accounts that aggregated fascinating relics and would fling links back and forth at one another in their downtime on set, iPads on their laps. And when they showed up in the morning and left at night (or showed up at night and left in the morning, if it was a night shoot) they showed up and left in street clothes that were not from one decade in particular but were a kind of distillation of old-ness, the kind of thing that would prompt the odd barista or receptionist to say, “I love your (garment)… Totally throwback.”
He hated the term “throwback,” it reminded him of an ill-advised stint, in that perilous chasm between “child star” and “working adult actor,” as a white rapper. It was possible to be a rapper and be white and not be a “white rapper.” But at 15, it had not been possible for him.
But he was 22 now and she was 21 and he drove a matte-black early-50s pickup truck that he had found on Craigslist back when it was red, and when he’d driven it onto the lot of the Santa Monica man who was going to restore it, the balding man with a long salt-and-pepper beard had said, “Dude, that’s what I’M talkin’ about.”
She drove a late-60s BMW, sky-blue and purchased from a indistinctly European guy she later described to the makeup woman as “porn-y.”
He had been featured in a GQ fashion spread about the cultural significance and essential American manliness of the plain white t-shirt. There was a petition that went around online when she hadn’t been cast as one of the Manson girls in a forthcoming TV movie.
She was dying to see it, though. She knew the girl who ended up playing Linda and she knew for a fact the pretender hadn’t done her research.
There was a post on this Tumblr she liked about an abandoned 1950s suburban housing development on a tiny strip of land between LAX and the ocean. She forwarded it to him. He seemed to respond almost before she sent it:
We’re going.
She had regretted mentioning it to one of the wardrobe ladies, who begged to be taken along — “I am SO into freaky stuff like that.” But she remembered the wardrobe lady had to pick up her son from her ex-husband on Friday nights after they wrapped, if they wrapped on time, and it looked like they were going to, so she was able to invite the lady to go with them that night without any fear that she might actually come.
After wrap he followed her to her place in the coolest part of an uncool part of town, and she parked the BMW in her carport and went inside to change into more appropriate shoes, tennis shoes she had almost thrown away when the costume designer had described them as “SO early-90’s Boston,” but decided to keep once the designer admitted she only thought of them as early-90s because her father had had a pair just like them when SHE was growing up, but he had been wearing them since the 70s.
While he waited, he cued up a Hank Williams Pandora station and toggled the FM knob until he found the radio frequency his little iPhone device had created. The truck idled in a solid, satisfying way, and she came out and hopped up and then he drove them down to the 10, and once on the freeway he rolled his window down with the hand-crank and let the wind blow through his haircut.
He backed the truck up to the barbed wire in a stretch where there were no streetlights. There was a heavy blanket in back and they threw it over the top of the fence and it was easy climbing since they were starting halfway up thanks to the truck bed.
They both told each other how not worried they were about getting in trouble: they had peers who did a lot of drugs and fucked other people’s wives and husbands and you could get away with a lot if you were smart about it, so certainly you could get away with breaking into an abandoned curiosity for purely anthropological reasons. They were both sober. He had a flask but he always had a flask, it was less about the booze and more about the flask. The flask had an Apache head engraved on it, the way everything cool and manly seemed to before, say, 1975.
Their feet landed on the grass on the other side. Neither of them had a scratch. He pulled the blanket down, folded it up, and tucked it beneath his arm. They walked.
Neither of them had brought a flashlight. They’d both forgotten but then retroactively justified it: a flashlight could attract too much attention. And they both agreed a flashlight always made things scarier. Raking that beam around made everything eerie and you never knew what would show up in the light. Darkness was just dark. Darkness with a spot of light moving around it was where you really got into cat-jumping-out-and-giving-you-a-heart-attack country.
They walked down a broad street with one-story houses on either side that ran perpendicular to the water. The antique streetlights were unlit and a fire-hydrant, which he almost tripped over, looked like a friendly Iron Age robot. She walked wide around a storm drain.
Planes would appear overhead every couple minutes, most of them hitting a point in the sky high above the ocean and then slingshotting around, just as their red-eye had done a few weeks back when they’d flown to New York for press week.
The absence of a flashlight was starting to defeat their purpose. There wasn’t much in the way of moonlight, the night sky a low layer of glowing cold. Her eyes were starting to do that thing where darkness gets so dark it’s velvet. It was hard to see all the specific architectural details. It was hard to see anything except a grey band of ocean at the end of a dark corridor.
They got there. She thought about living here when living here was a thing you could do, the way you were in this kind of perfect anonymous American suburbia and then you were at the Pacific Ocean with no intervening layer of beach-town. Leave your house and turn left: America. Leave your house and turn right:
There was a lump in the ocean.
How still could whales be, he wondered. Maybe a whale had been beached and then the tide came in and nobody had noticed because you weren’t legally allowed to be on this strip of coast.
Then it rose.
You could really only see its shape as a silhouette against a dull horizon. It was a dome of black, and it had arms or legs or tentacles. It really didn’t matter what you called them, they were good for grabbing, and they grabbed him, and they grabbed her, and they were screaming as the thing pulled them in.
They were hanging upside down, and neither could hear the other one screaming because each of them were screaming so loud. The thing drew them in, and there was this incredible stench, and a kind of sloshing gastrological rumble that slowly became voices, and the voices told them:
The thing was older than the world. By being there they were violating an ancient agreement between life on Earth and not-life in the stars. And not the stars the Apollo astronauts he admired so much had been trying to reach. The dead weird ones between the ones you could easily see.
It didn’t do anything but hold them and talk in its way where the words could not be understood but also created pictures in your mind you could not turn away from.
It showed them a time before "back in the day." It showed them a time before "day."
She held it together physiologically but she found herself earnestly wishing for death at several points. He pissed and shat in his two thousand dollar jeans, the ones that had come with a card detailing everything that was known about every man who’d worn them since 1939.
It let them go before the sun came up. They eventually reached the fence again. He realized he’d left the blanket, and they both scaled the fence and braved the barbed wire without complaint, and it tore at their young bodies and neither one of them cried out or said or felt anything at all.
When they got in and he turned the car on, the radio was still tuned to a blank static-y non-station, and that was fine. They listened to white noise and took the freeway back to her place, where he dropped her off at sunrise and she got out, and neither one of them made any attempt to make eye contact before he drove away.
On Monday his agent called him: there was a big role for him in an upcoming remake of a movie from the 80s. He told his agent he never wanted to so much as think about anything old ever again.
“Got it,” said his agent. “Originals only. Maybe just this one, though? I mean, this is a really hot script.”
He reiterated forcefully.
“You could be waiting a while,” his agent said.
He told his agent that was fine.
On Monday night she asked that one wardrobe lady if the wardrobe lady wanted the dress she’d worn to set that day. She’d bought it because it had a wonderful kind of 1940s USO-tour thing to it. Now it felt heavy and suspect on her skin.
“Sure,” said the wardrobe lady. “I live for great old stuff like this. You really don’t want it anymore?”
She shook her head.
“Suit yourself,” said the wardrobe lady. “But what are you gonna wear home?”
They were alone, and that was good, because what she felt that what she was going to say was strange and embarrassing. She asked the wardrobe lady if anywhere, anywhere in their whole trailer and truck, if they anything new, and not just new in the sense of being recently manufactured. Not owing to any trend, not harkening back to anything. New.
“That’s not really what we do,” said the wardrobe lady. “I mean, if you wish this show were a little more Star Trek, all I gotta say is, you and me both, babe.”
She was happy to be rid of that dress. She’d settle for a hoodie until the right thing came along. She felt certain she would know it when she saw it.
Tonight I was out walking and I heard a little girl yell at her mom:
"When do I get to have a sleepover?"
And her mom yelled back:
"YOU'RE HAVING ONE!"
I completely understood.
Sometimes we are definitely NOT having a sleepover. Which sucks, and every human being ought to have the right to sleepovers, sleepovers are awesome.
Sometimes we are having a sleepover, and we recognize it as such, but it's not exactly how we pictured it all week at school when the thought of the impending sleepover was the only thing keeping us sane. Our parents are being a little more observant than maybe we promised our friends, or a little less chill about the noise we are making than they were last time, or Kevin who's extremely charismatic talked everybody in to renting a video we ourselves had no interest in watching instead of Monty Python And The Holy Grail which we know everyone would like if they would've given it a chance. And the superficial differences between the sleepover we were having in our heads all week and the one happening all around us is bugging us, until around eleven PM we start panicking, it's almost lights out and here we've spent the entirety of the time since everyone got dropped off at seven noticing how this sleepover is not measuring up to our mental one, not at all, and it's completely prevented us from enjoying the sleepover in front of us, and we're not gonna get to have another one until next year if we're lucky, our parents are cool enough but not that cool that we can just have everybody over again next Friday night if we so choose.
And then sometimes we are having a sleepover and we can't even bring ourselves to recognize it as such. We are having a Tuesday middle-of-the-school-day feeling and here it is, a Friday night when everyone's over. And we might even find ourselves saying out loud that we wish we were at a sleepover and somebody might remind us that we are. And we might think "how dumb or messed up am I that I was longing to have a sleepover in the middle of what everyone agrees is my sleepover." And we have to fight to make ourselves enjoy the pizza and soda and the just-ever-so-slightly-too-mature movie and feel the airy freedom of the oversized t-shirt and novelty SPAM boxers we're wearing as pajamas. And everyone else is having the greatest time and we feel very alone.
I hope that ten years on when that mom echoes back to that girl what she said tonight, that she longed to have a sleepover when she was in the middle of having a sleepover, a rare one on a weeknight no less, I hope the boyfriend or girlfriend or best friend or whoever is there that the mom is telling the story to in hopes of mildly embarrassing her daughter, I hope that person goes, "I totally get that. I too have longed to have a sleepover in the middle of having a sleepover."
Today on the plane the pilot garbled his weather forecast and I'm pretty sure he told us that on the ground in Los Angeles we could expect "light winds out of the past."
The movie Goodfellas ends with its hero, Henry Hill, entering the Witness Protection Program and moving from New York to Arizona. The sequel opens as Henry meets an elementary-school-aged DC Pierson and immediately becomes his mentor, guardian, and friend. Without further ado, I present to you selected narration from Goodfellas 2: My Gangster.
Henry and I liked each other immediately. I think Henry identified with me, because he had skipped rising through a normal society of suckers and opted for the fast track with a life of crime, and I’d had the chance to skip second grade because of my advanced reading level, though my parents decided not to do it because they thought socialization was important.
My father was always pissed off. He hated Henry, ‘cause my father was a software engineer. Henry was also a software engineer, but he was shitty at it, because it was a Witness Protection cover job and he had no training and no experience. Like a bum, my father sweated anonymously all day and all night over subroutines and decision trees, while Henry would walk in the door and all the cubicle monkeys would go wild. He’d slip a hundred to the HR lady, two hundred to the guy who refilled the snack machines just for keeping the Mountain Dew cold. The most work he’d do all day was sitting down at his computer terminal and slipping a hundred dollar bill right into the floppy disk drive. Who knew you could bribe a computer?
In third grade they built a new school near us, Kyrene De La Esperanza. The kids got to vote on what the mascot would be. Our choices were something to do with cacti, the Estrellas (which means “the stars” in Spanish) and the Sharks. The proposed Sharks logo even featured a cool 90’s shark wearing awesome shades. In our hearts and minds, it wasn’t even a contest.
But the fix was in. The teachers were going to ram through Estrellas, and there was nothing we kids could do about it. We just had to sit there and take it. They thought the Estrellas name would prepare us for a multi-cultural, multi-lingual education that would be essential in the 21st century. Nothing against our brothers and sisters to the south, but there’s one thing a rapid transition to a globalized economy would never change: kids love sharks, especially ones with sunglasses.
Henry found out about it, and he gave those teachers a lesson they’d never forget. He walked right into the teacher’s lounge and pistol-whipped the ringleader. As this was Arizona, he was able to charge through the school with a firearm, and people just assumed he was a good guy with a gun on his way to neutralize a bad guy with a gun.
“The kids can have whatever mascot they want!” he screamed, then he kicked the guy out onto the street and right into an open fire hydrant that was gushing water. That was one thing Henry taught me that I’ll never forget: after brutally beating their enemies, real wiseguys always kick them right into the spray of an open fire hydrant. The double wetness, blood and water, really does a number on their self-esteem. It was so important to Henry that he’d unwrenched the thing himself seconds before walking into my school with a gun.
The fire hydrant treatment was extra humiliating in Arizona, since we were a dry desert climate and water conservation measures meant that not only was this beatdown painful, it was ecologically unsound.
Another teacher, he beat with his own mug. It had raised lettering reading “World’s Greatest Teacher” on it, which the guy imprinted on his forehead for a week. Because of what it said, we all called him rehcaet s’dlrow tsetaerg, something my brief flirtation with learning Klingon had left me uniquely prepared to pronounce.
It might sound insane, but here’s what the FBI could never understand: Henry was for people who couldn’t go to the teachers, because the teachers hated sharks.
Then there was the time me and my friends got harassed by the teachers for playing Magic: The Gathering at lunch time. Some kids had complained. They didn’t have Magic: The Gathering cards, so they couldn’t play, so by playing the game ourselves, we were being exclusionary.
Henry blew his stack when I told him. The next day, he put a spell on these kids they wouldn’t soon forget. I mean, he really tapped their mana. I mean, he played a Black Lotus on these kids, a card that hasn’t been legal since First Edition.
What I mean is, he beat up children.
After that, the kids who complained carried my red/green combo deck to the lunch table FOR me. You know why? It was out of respect.
Everything Henry had ever taught me really came to fruition when Pizza Hut started offering their “Book It!” program. It was the perfect scam. What made it even more perfect was that most kids wouldn’t even read the books, they would just say they had and get their allotted one personal pan pizza per week anyway. My angle was to actually read the books. This way I scored not only the pizza, but a smug feeling of mental superiority.
Now any time Pizza Hut needs a book read, they can call DC. Sounder? They can call DC. The Westing Game? They can call DC. But now Pizza Hut has to come up with DC’s pizza every week. Ran out of ranch dressing for crust-dipping? Fuck you, feed me. Teenage dish-washer accidentally put the drying cycle on extra-hot and melted all your red pebbled drinking glasses? Fuck you, feed me.
And then, when there’s nothin’ left, when you’ve fed him absolutely every personal pizza in the joint, and he’s still got a whole Ironwood Public Library full of Michael Crichton novels to slowly read and BARELY understand, you light a match.
This will distract DC, as he is fascinated by fire and will soon go through a brief phase of burning newspapers in a flowerpot in the backyard after school. Then sneak out and buy more pizza stuff.
The house music mix for my show tonight is too real for 'em. It's called DC PIERSON WILL STEAL YOUR GIRLFRIEND and it's at 7 PM at the UCB Theater in Los Angeles. Dominic Dierkes is opening and you can still get tickets here: http://losangeles.ucbtheatre.com/performances/view/30539
One of the things that makes Settlers Of Catan a great board game is, you’re never “out.” You never get fully eliminated before the game itself is over, so even if you have zero chance of winning you can still hang out in the game and be a headache for the person who has a ninety percent chance of winning.
I wish life was like that. That no one ever died, that instead of dying you just became not-really-a-factor, but you could still hang out and crack jokes and, more importantly, mess with some asshole who’s still kicking.
I was checking out at Trader Joe's. I was wearing my Google t-shirt.
The older check-out lady said, "Wasn't Google on the Internet yesterday?"
"... It's always on the Internet," I said, maybe too affronted for someone that has no personal or financial stake in Google.
"No, not Google," she said. "What was it? They had a billion dollars or something?"
"Twitter," I said. "Twitter had their IPO yesterday."
"That's it," she said. "They went on the Internet yesterday."
I didn't correct her again. We all knew what we meant. And at some point during this exchange, two people clarifying for each other who exactly has billions of dollars and why, I had the following thought:
A predetermined total amount of sex is going to be had in the world tonight. Some of it will either be had by you or it won't. Now stop agonizing over that text message.
