My Relinquishment of James Van Der Beek

Why am I thinking of Van Der Beek? I imagine it’s because I’m at that Coffee Bean on Hillhurst where I wrote that thriller I got him to read. I wrote a lot of it here — its epic patio walled-in with trees and geometric patterns of sun and shade everywhere.

I also wrote a lot of it at my old apartment near here, writing into the night with the French doors open to Los Feliz’ lemon trees and bungalows and blue dream, everything unspooling ribbonlike towards Silver Lake. I’d imagine I was a hot air balloon above it all.

I’d take breaks between writing to call mom and Steph. I wanted to succeed for them, to justify what we’d been through together. Perhaps my thriller would be that thing — it had its flourishes. One of which was a deus ex machina, or “act of God,” in which a writer ends their story with an unlikely development, like a tornado or an alligator attack. Mine concerned an atom bomb.

Not long after I finished the script, Van Der Beek was set to do a photoshoot at a live/work space near downtown LA where friends of mine were living. He was perfect for the lead. So I left my script on a coffee table there for him to flip-through between setups.

Later I heard that he had indeed flipped through the script. He even read sections out loud for the crew, but in a way that was unflattering to the work. He mocked the writing, reserving most of his derision for my deus ex machina.

I took the news hard. If I was a balloon back then, Van Der Beek twisted me into the shape of a dog. Dawson’s Creek was a fixture of my teenage years; the show a warm blanket atop my broken and fiercely loving family. To hear Dawson himself had mocked my work was a dark outcome. And it caught me unaware. I felt that in the future I would need to prepare myself for these dark outcomes, and I’d make terrifying prognoses before getting seized with terror that what I was actually making were self-fulfilling prophecies. Those were heady years for me Van Der Beek kicked off.

But finding myself here in my old neighborhood, I suddenly forgive him and I feel massive because of it. As big as an atom bomb. As big as Dawson. As big as a miraculous, out-of-nowhere ending.