Humphrey Lemon, Consigliore

            In the 1989 movie “Parenthood,” Gil Buckman, the main character, says something that in my far-too-frequent moments of self-pity I consider an anthem to my entire adult existence:
            “My whole life is have to.”
            Gil, portrayed by Steve Martin, struggles with everything from raising kids and making a living, to getting along with his family and trying to latch onto some optimism.
            Me too.
            There are a few differences. Gil’s kids are young, mine are grown. Gill has a steady, full-time job, and I’m a freelancer with no benefits and few assurances. But other than that, whenever you see me getting out of my car in Stamford, CT after a two-and-a-half-hour commute from home, please feel free to call me Gill. And to give me an aspirin.
             I’m a writer with a dream (and a sore butt): although I enjoy marketing communications, I’d feel far more professionally satisfied if I could write for the movies and TV. I’ve actually come close; once I nearly sold a script to a division of Disney and wrote several sitcom episodes that were passed along to the producers. But when my Hollywood opportunities didn’t pan out, I went back to marketing communications for a very good reason. I have to.
             If one day my dreams do pan out, the first movie I’ll write will be about my commute.  But I just don’t know if it would be a comedy or a horror film. Here’s the true story. You decide.
            Two years ago, after 20 years of working for big companies in public relations and corporate communications, and another 10 as a freelance copywriter, I found myself severely underemployed. So my wife and I relocated from New Jersey to the Hartford, Connecticut region to start over. It was a nightmare relocation, which I documented in my Kindle e-book, “I Would Rather Have Root Canal Once a Week For the Rest of My Life Than Ever Buy a House Again.” But the relocation wasn’t the only problem. I was still unable to find work. All those big insurance companies with busy corporate communications departments—but no insurance that any of them would want to hire a guy in his mid-50s who was a little behind the times, technologically speaking. Although I’m a wiz with Word, I don’t excel at Excel, and while I have a lovely LinkedIn page, I’m a terrible tweeter. Despite my skills and portfolio, no one wanted to hire me. It was depressing. I felt like Robert Duval as Tom Hagen in “The Godfather,” when Michael tells him that he isn’t a wartime consigliore and wouldn’t be taking part in the five-family bloodbath. Apparently I wasn’t a wartime corporate communicator.   
            I did manage to secure several freelance assignments, but income from freelance work was just a tenth of what my wife and I needed to make ends meet in the new house. We didn’t even have enough left over after expenses to hire a carting service. Why, I wondered, did we even have anything to cart away in the first place? I thought negligible income would produce minimum refuse. But that’s not the way the world works. No matter how life treats you, there’s always garbage.
            Finally I was offered the chance to be a freelance corporate writer for a large technology firm in Stamford. It wasn’t a full-time job, but it was, for the time-being, full-time income. It wasn’t TV or the movies, but it was good work doing what I was trained to do. So I accepted. I may be a dreamer, but I’m not an idiot. I also agreed to come into the office five days a week, despite the five-hour roundtrip commute.
            Okay—maybe I am an idiot.
            First I decided to advertise for an apartment to share with someone else in a similar situation.  I hooked up with a guy from Rhode Island who also worked in Stamford, and together we found a small apartment. I was there alone the first two nights. So I was the only one who got about 25 bug bites on my hands, arms, legs and torso. Spiders! I immediately got out of the lease.
            So it was back to commuting.
            To eliminate at least one round trip I started staying one night a week in a cut-rate motel on the outskirts of town. I woke up that first morning with about 45 bites on my hands, arms, legs and back. Bed bugs!
            Back to the five-day commute.
            A few weeks later I discovered the Stamford Jewish Community Center. The monthly fee was reasonable, and there were significant health benefits from swimming and working out every morning. So I began attending, and while it doesn’t eliminate a commute, it forces me to leave my house much earlier, the result of which is far less traffic on the highways and a savings of about 45 minutes on the road. 
            Unfortunately, waking up so early does occasionally cloud my mental acuity, and that created a problem. One morning I neglected to take Rosh Hashana into account and arrived at the JCC only to find it closed. I was un-showered, unshaved, my unruly hair reaching into a thousand directions—yet I had an important meeting in two hours. I felt like Jack Lemmon in “The Out-of-Towners,” the 1970 movie in which Lemmon’s character shows up for an important job interview in torn, tattered clothes that were ruined during an overnight adventure in Manhattan.
            Meanwhile, garbage was piling up at my house since we still didn’t feel competent enough to sign on with a carting service. So I started throwing Hefty bags into out-of-the-way dumpsters on my ride to Stamford. One day at home I found ants lounging in a sugar bowl, so I dumped the entire contents into a kitchen garbage bag and threw the bag in the trunk of my car. On the ride to Stamford that morning, ants started marching around the steering wheel, across the dashboard, over the passenger seat, even up my legs. They had escaped from the bag in the trunk and, with their insect GPS, found their way to me. I felt like Humphrey Bogart fighting off blood-sucking leeches in “The African Queen.” Of course, director John Huston was able to yell “Cut,” and Humphrey could simply stop trying to remove what I can only imagine were fake leeches. The ants in my car were very real, and John Huston was nowhere to be found.
            Two months later, my supervisor left the company and the vice president of human resources said there was no reason why I couldn’t work from home two days a week. So now my commute is effectively down to three round trips.
            I still drive about 480 miles and spend a small fortune in gas every week, and my butt continues to fight with my nerves for kvetching rights. But I receive a steady income for crafting words, and that’s a blessing. Is the experience worth putting up with occasional traffic, spiders, bed bugs, ants and meetings with bad hair? Of course. First of all, it gives me material that I might be able to use one day, cinematically or otherwise. More importantly, I have to.