Heads Carolina, Tails California

I have not boarded an airplane in more than five years. Admittedly, I’ve never been a good flyer – the image of me at 30,000 feet can best be compared to a rabid raccoon barricaded in a crawlspace. However, being an only child in Los Angeles, living across the country from my parents in North Carolina, has historically meant the burden of travel has been on yours truly (after all, they outnumber me). I’d endure flights back east with clenched teeth, all too happy for my father to greet me at the airport – not just because I missed him, but because I’d survived. I’d then spend the handful of days I had in town dreading the flight back, equally aware of the stigma that came with staying away from L.A. too long. Although maybe it was my imagination that remaining too long in Charlotte would somehow telegraph to the world that I had quietly quit (nay, failed) in my pursuit of a film career. My policy felt absolute: Charlotte was the past, L.A. was – desperately – the present and future both. So, for the better part of eight years, I boarded those merciless planes, gripped my arm rests, and got rapidly reacquainted with the Lord above.

Admittedly, it was not preference but circumstance that dictated my initial decision to stop flying in March 2020. I’d just flown back to L.A., eager to direct the world premiere of Roger Q. Mason’s brilliant play Lavender Men, until the pandemic derailed our production one week into rehearsals. I was summarily confined alone in the Valley, discovering this new-fangled thing called Zoom. When spring was winding down and my father’s 80th birthday was approaching, I began to wonder, as did virtually the entire world, How long will this go on? When will I see my family? How do I attempt it without contracting a mysterious plague that could be even worse if shared with my older loved ones? And soon enough, I was resolved. I would drive home. I trusted that plan much more than exposing myself to a cabin of passengers, especially since a vaccine was still nowhere in sight. Not even my parents could disagree. Endowed with the secret thrill that I’d be on terra firma the whole way home, rendering my most despised part of modern life at least temporarily optional, I packed the car and devised my stealthy little route across the continent.

“The American interstates are a wonderful place to be outside of yourself, and a convenient place to be unmoored,” writes my dear friend Jordan Kisner in her breathtaking essay collection, Thin Places. “Driving through the American West produces … the sense that you’re driving through a gigantic metaphor – the landscape is so preposterously large, you’ve seen it so many times in books and movies about grand and perilous American journeys. You’ve seen this figure before, making her way across the desert, driven by motivations that echo. The figure is now you, you are now her, moving through not so much a real place as a corner of the collective unconscious. It’s all pleasantly and unnervingly surreal, or hyperreal, like living a story that’s already been written.” I’ve driven 10 round trips from L.A. to Charlotte over the past five years, and I think about Jordan’s words every time. Now, though, I wrestle with a larger question: What happens when the story that’s already been written becomes two tales, running in parallel, connected by the 2500 miles of ligament we call I-40?

I never intended to be bicoastal, a term that feels to me like such a vestige of the 2010s and its graveyard of buzzwords. It happened accidentally. After all, once I arrived at my respective destination, I wanted to linger for a bit. Putting in (at minimum) three days of work driving means you don’t then turn back around lightly. Even once vaccines arrived, my road trips had become such a habit and I enjoyed them so much that I simply wanted to see how long I could keep up my commitment to avoiding the skies. And, of course, there were curveballs that necessitated longer stays on either coast – family health emergencies, organizing bachelor parties, the arrival of godchildren, shooting multiple movies, even finally mounting that delayed production of Lavender Men, which then somehow even turned into its own feature film. But the longer I remained in each spot, the more I found myself putting down a dueling ecosystem of roots. Lately I’ve come to consider myself like the intrepid fairy tale character Jack in Sondheim’s Into the Woods, which usually gets some airplay from me on the stretch of highway between Albuquerque and Memphis. I’m clinging to my beanstalk, traversing between the Kingdom of the Giants above and my childhood village below: “The roof, the house, and your mother at the door / The roof, the house, and the world you never thought to explore / And you think of all of the things you’ve seen / And you wish that you could live in between …”

These feelings crystallized for me most recently when I returned to Charlotte for my 20th high school reunion. I hadn’t seen many of my classmates since the diplomas were put in our hands – pretty standard for most people – but my class is also a slightly unusual case, in that I have no memory of a time when I did not know most of them. We’re a class of roughly 120 kids, most of whom I met at four years old in junior kindergarten and proceeded through the next 14 years in tandem until senior year. Just by simple math, that means we spent more than a third of our lives thus far together, creating a shared history, understanding, and intimacy that can never be faked. As we all gathered together in the new gymnasium, it felt more like a family reunion than an academic one, and I found myself far more emotional than I’d thought I’d be, seeing what extraordinary people I’d grown up with. When the evening concluded and I drove back to my parents’ house, crawling into the same bed I slept in for my entire childhood, I realized the day’s events could just as easily have been my itinerary on that same date in 2005: “Pick up McKenzie beforehand. Lunch with George. Text my parents when I leave the party.” And I suddenly wanted so badly to stay.

But, of course, that was impossible; I knew I had to get back to L.A. I had not one but two features coming out in just a matter of days, not only Lavender Men’s film adaptation, but also the incredible Julia Max’s horror movie The Surrender, which I’d produced. (Naturally filming two movies two years apart means they come out within two weeks of each other!) And while I knew and know that I’d never have had any of these opportunities I dreamt of as a kid had I not moved out to L.A. … that night, I wanted only to remain in North Carolina with my parents, with the kids I grew up alongside, with the whole city that I was so ready to evacuate when I left for college in 2005. For one brief day, I’d flown faster than any airplane could have taken me. I was in a time machine.

I suppose I’m realizing what’s maybe been at the heart of my recent bicoastal anxieties … It’s about time. And maybe my avoidance of flying has become an excuse to mask another type of dread. The fear that I can’t give my time to everything and everyone that deserves it. The fear that I won’t be in the right place at the right moment, for my family, for my friends, for my career. The fear – no, the certainty – that there’s an inevitable expiration date to this double life, with my two beds, two wardrobes, two neighborhoods, two collections of people I love. But perhaps it’s innate to the human experience that we’ll never have everything all at once. And all any of us can do is strive to be is our most radically present, whether that’s splitting a Sunday waffle at Café Monte on Fairview or gazing up through the oak trees in Descanso Gardens.

One of the songs my mom played all the time when I was a kid was Jo Dee Messina’s “Heads Carolina, Tails California.” As I drove back to L.A. a few weeks ago, I blasted that country music classic at least a dozen times, comforting myself that it won’t soon be time to choose. I remind myself the only true mistake I could make is not to savor both sides of the coin. Because one day I know I’m going to have to get back on another wretched plane. I’m going to have to rush through visits in one hometown or the other, yet again. My roots won’t be planted in the same way. But until that happens, I’m choosing to embrace the fact that I’ve traveled my route so many times I no longer need a map to know where home is – in either direction.

Featured image shows Lovell Holder driving cross country; all images courtesy Lovell Holder.