D-Tours - Excerpt

When I was forced to leave Hollywood, I was determined that it would be a temporary detour at worst. Still, it would take me fifteen years and a handful of other abortive careers before I returned to filmmaking, one misadventure inspiring another.

Semi-fatal love was my perpetual unmooring. When I fell, when I lost my heart, I seemed to fall headlong and forever. I fell hard, and when I got back on my feet, I was never quite the same person again.

Am I getting ahead of myself here, rushing off with unseemly haste to the final fade to black? Maybe it wasn't love at all, but chance, blind circumstance, fate, that kept me away for the longest time from what I wanted most to do.

Maybe what I did was take the wrong flight or get seated next to the wrong woman on the wrong flight. Exiled from Hollywood, I had gone into the public relations business in San Francisco (a psychotherapy student at Stanford in my spare time), and I was returning from an assignment in Paris, which had led me also to Brussels, Milan and Beirut, causing the postponement of my return for almost a month. Everything factored in to this chance meeting. And even if I knew in advance what was going to happen, I would have accepted my ultimately unhappy fate with open arms.