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fell in love with Oliver, a successful Hollywood producer who I thought would be the answer to that dream. I would write books and screenplays, and he would make them into movies, and I too would see my Hollywood star rise.
     
    But that wasn’t reality. At the time, I could barely pay my bills. I would go to the local gas station, and it would be me and a bunch of female CHAs in their convertible BMWs. For all I know, they might have had PhDs in nuclear physics, but I get the feeling that their M3s came more from modeling gigs and wealthy older boyfriends. And I hated them. I wanted so badly just to have their good highlights and small button noses, and then I wouldn’t have to do anything more than ask for a light in order to find love. Though being well-read and asking the tough questions and being considered a challenge to the men I dated might have helped me feel better about myself, I would wonder whether it was all worth it. Whether the CHAs had this thing figured out with a lot less thinking and a lot less disappointment.
     
    I don’t know how to respond to Doug’s question. So I cock my head to the side and say something to the effect of, “On good days,” which makes no sense. As though on my bad days, I become a blithering moron. It’s actually on the bad days when I am too smart, when I overthink and overdose my head with thoughts about who I am and where I am going and why some things just aren’t meant to be.
     
    We finish dinner, and I need to get going. I am picking up my friend Siren to go to a party at the Standard in Hollywood. Even though I don’t live there anymore, even though a part of me has moved on since that dream, I still like to visit the universe next door from time to time. Doug and I leave the restaurant, and I am laughing. I feel totally comfortable.
     
    And here is where the dilemma is revealed: Would I like to go out with Doug again?
     
    Sure.
     
    Would I like Doug to be my boyfriend?
     
    No.
     
    And why not?
     
    I don’t know.
     
    For all my smarts, I know even less.
     

6
     
    Date Six: Desperado
     
    I hang up the phone with my father and stare dumbly at the porch of my friends’ beach house in Oxnard. My friends John and Teresa stay in this house every winter. It is one of those Big Easy rentals that make real life feel very far away—an old wood cabin with wind whistling through its walls. We have to climb out a window to get to the backyard, but it’s well worth it because the backyard is the roiling Pacific. We come home smelling like salt, and every November I look forward to this time with my friends, lounging in blankets on the cold, wet sand.
     
    Though this weekend is technically not a date, it feels like it has pushed me closer to love than any encounter I have had so far, and I wonder whether that is all these dates might be: real experiences in the search for this thing called love.
     
    If that’s the case, then next week my visit to my dad will probably be one of the most important dates of my life. I will be face-to-face with him for the first time in years, and for the first time since I got sober, and though there is a part of me that wants to see him, that has dreamed of seeing him, there is also a part of me that is really, really scared.
     
    My father was arrested when I was four. I don’t remember it happening. He was in Panama City with his mistress at the time, and my mom and I were down in Ft. Lauderdale, staying with my grandmother because everyone, except for my father, could feel that the end was near. I should say it wasn’t the first time my father had been arrested. Before I was born, he had spent time in Mexican prisons, escaped from every jail they had put him in, and by the time I came along, had graduated from small-time pot dealer to one of the biggest marijuana smugglers working in 1977. Certainly not a cottage industry then, if ever.
     
    I am consistently told that I loved my daddy like no one else on earth. I could be