Peep Show: Loneliness on New Year's Eve

As a sometimes-adult, I can finally admit it: I have no use for New Year’s Eve. It bugs me.

As a kid, I ate an entire box of peanut butter cookies and rang in the big-ball drop hovered over the toilet. I could never eat those things again.

Later in life, I joined all the forced frivolity. I drank too much, said too much, and woke up hung over, ruing both behaviors.

But one particular New Year’s Eve goes down in my personal annals of abject loneliness and despair.

It was 1995, a good year in many respects. I learned a few things about myself, published a few stories, even changed skins.

And shotgun-blasted out of my first marriage, I fell in love again, this time for good.

Yet, alas, the launch of 1995 was ignominious at best.

I sat in a windowless room on Van Nuys Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley.

Inside a peep show.

Alone with myself.

As 1994 drew to a close, I was a man grasping for personal meaning.

Separated from my first wife, sharing a house in Sherman Oaks with my younger brother, I was seeing a therapist, trying to figure out answers to a painful but important questions:

How does a man go from that bright shining walk down the chapel-aisle with the woman of his dreams, to that pot-holed path to divorce court?

And how much blame did I shoulder for that car-wreck ending?

A lot, as it turns out.

As a so-called functioning adult I was a mess. I owned one pair of shoes, drove a nondescript used car and washed my clothes at a laundromat.

My career as a newspaper reporter was undistinguished. I went to work, wrote my stories, and came home, wondering what was next.

So I drank beer, so much that my brother and I left a Great Wall of empty cases of Henry Weinhard beer on the side of our rental house, our shrine to adult confusion.

There was one extracurricular activity that gave my life a bit of meaning.

I was writing a screenplay for the Hollywood mega-producer Jon Peters. It was based on a newspaper feature story I’d written the year before about a gay man who protected the drag queens who languished in the county jail.

Peters loved the idea, in fact he loved everything about the project.

Except me.

But I had signed a contract with the story’s main character, so the former hairstylist was stuck with me. Looking back, I can appreciate his disgust. 

I had never written a screenplay before. I was winging it, far outside my comfort zone, trying to put into action the lessons I’d learned by reading a few books.

On nights and weekends, I sat in the den of my rental house with the gray shag carpet, typing on a boxy, dinosaur-looking Apple computer, trying to write my way into a new life.

Of course, I had no plans for that New Year’s Eve.

My brother was elsewhere. I was alone.

A friend called about 6 p.m. and said he was going to a party in the Hollywood Hills. He knew I was a sad sack and probably felt sorry for me.

Come, he said. There’ll be some hot women there.

Around 10 p.m., I reluctantly pushed myself away from my screenplay labors and drove up into the hills, looking for the party address in the darkness.

Unluckily, I found it.

Inside was like a fever dream. Figures dressed in black shifted about. I couldn’t make out faces. I knew no one, spoke to no one. My friend wasn’t there. I had one drink and left, feeling like the loneliest man on earth.

Driving down those curvy roads, I knew I couldn’t just return to that computer. 

After all, this was New Year’s Eve. And I still had a modicum of self respect, a Pavlovian urge to have some fun.

And then I remembered the sign I’d seen driving on Van Nuys Boulevard.

New York-style peep shows, it said.

I parked in the the lot, feeling really more curious than randy.

This was a bit of research, I told myself. I’d been to too many strip clubs, but never a peep show. It sounded somehow more perverted, more desperate.

Perfect for a lonely-loser life.

I walked in, greeted by a man sitting on a stool. I couldn’t see past him.

“Twenty bucks,” he said. 

I handed over the cash.

“You need some fives?” he said, not looking at me.

Sure, I answered. 

Luckily, I had one last twenty-spot in my wallet.

He gave me four five-dollar bills.

I was on my own from there.

The place was dark. I stumbled down a short hallway with several closed doors. Each bore a sign. 

The first one read: Doctor’s office.

I went inside and sat in a folding chair facing a large shaded window.

I waited for the show to begin.

Then a woman’s voice came over a tinny speaker.

“Put a five in.”

And there it was: a little bill machine. I slid in a fiver and the screen opened.

The scene was a medical examination room. A woman in a nurse's outfit walked in. Her uniform was short. She ignored me. 

Maybe that’s what most customers preferred. There was no communication. I was simply anonymous.

I was peeping.

A Peeping John. The phrase fit me perfectly.

The nurse straightened a few items and walked over to the exam table and bent over.

Then the curtain went down.

It has lasted less than a minute.

But I finally had finally figured out the business paradigm. You shoved five-dollar bills into the little machine until you ran out of money.

I put in another and then another. She didn’t get far in her little striptease act. The gambit was to go slow, spread things out.

Finally, I inserted my last fiver.

When the curtain closed for the last time, I realized that it was about midnight.

I stood to go. But some sense of ingrained sociability stopped me.

I turned back to the window.

“Happy New Year,” I said.

A moment passed.

Then came a disembodied female voice.

“Happy New Year to you, too."

I didn’t as much leave that place, as flee -- spiraling headlong into the year that would change my life.