harm and turns its users into willing zombies, it must be great. This might be for me. It’s a mind-set similar to what draws less-cautious people to heroin.
So I went. A Crossfit gym—they are called “boxes” officially, but continuing to call them “gyms” is how I convince myself that I am in but not of this world—opened up near me, and I figured that a new place would have a higher concentration of beginners—and perhaps a lower percentage of loud people with perfect bodies—so I joined.
I hated it from the moment I walked in the door, and I’ve been back five times a week ever since.
Here’s the deal: Crossfit is full of peacocky guys whose shirts come off the second the workout begins, to the point where you think: If this is how you’re going to be, why wear a shirt at all, anywhere? It is full of personal-trainer-looking women who will critique your push-up form, even if they’re not your actual personal trainer. You will work out to the point of intense and violent vomit, and you will come very close to getting in your car and going home. You will learn a thing called a “burpee,” which requires you to flop onto the ground, peel yourself back up onto your heels, jump up in the air and clap, and then do that a bunch of times in a row. You will be surrounded by people who talk about Crossfit and nothing else, who tell Crossfit jokes and wear Crossfit shirts that say things like “Buck Furpees.” You will do all this while you listen to Rage Against The Machine. It is deeply unpleasant.
It also works. If you’re diligent, after a few weeks of burpees and Olympic weightlifting moves, and the meat-intensive Paleo diet, you will notice a change in your body. You will see muscles you have never seen. (And also you will feel them, and they will feel sore.) You will have to buy new, smaller pants. People will ask you what you’ve been doing, and then you will watch the regret wash over their faces when you talk about Crossfit for an hour. You may injure yourself severely or have a meat-induced heart attack before you’re fifty, but you will have had abs for a moment before you go, and it will have been worth it.
I was pulling it together physically, but my mind was still a mess. I was still drinking like a college kid, still throwing myself at the wrong guys, still generally behaving like the scrub TLC wanted none of.
Right around the time I started Crossfit, I did a shoot at a house on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. A lot of people who have houses right there on the beach rent them out as filming locations, because how else are you going to make a mortgage payment like that? This place was a smallish shack in a little private surfing cove—a place where Big Kahuna would live in one of those Frankie and Annette movies. Along one wall there were acoustic guitars. Along another: surfboards. And along a third: psychology textbooks. I was intrigued, doubly so when I met the owner of the house, who was among the most attractive men I’d ever seen in person. So I had to ask, because I was fascinated and also because I wanted more reasons to stand near him: “What’s the deal with all the psychology books?” He said, “I just got my degree and my license to work as a clinical psychologist, and I’m going to run my practice out of my home. Instead of sitting in an office talking for an hour, we’ll grab surfboards and paddle out past the breakers to where it’s nice and still, and we’ll do our sessions out there in the ocean.”
I said, “Do you take Blue Cross?” He did not. I made an appointment anyway and have gone every other week since. And every other week, after I have finished a session talking about my feelings with my hot therapist in the Pacific Ocean, I think: “This is so absurdly Southern California that every single person I grew up with would never stop laughing if they knew about it.”
Good. Let them.
After Shane, I dated a long list of Los Angeles archetypes: The guy who got his dog high. The bartender who always seemed to have a little too much energy, and then I found out he sprinkled meth in his own drinks, like some kind of