Looking for You

By C.S. Alexander

After winning the Academy Award for Best Director, Stephen Tulley pours his heart out to his daughter during his acceptance speech in front of millions of people. It becomes one of the more memorable moments in Academy Award history and propels him to become one of the most eligible bachelors in the country. While his success seems as though it happened overnight, his maturity and ability to understand women, including his daughter, proves to be a much more arduous path. Looking For You is Stephen’s journey of a single father in his forties doing his best to find true love in a dating app world, connect with his daughter who feels the weight of his world on her shoulders including being his agent and manager, and navigate a career that comes with unexpected obstacles. Readers will emotionally connect and relate to Stephen as he recounts his experiences while continuing his journey to self-discovery, all to strengthen the relationships in his life and to find the love he is still looking for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C.S. Alexander
• Release date: May 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005475123

C.S. Alexander

C.S. Alexander is originally from Arcadia, a rural area outside of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In mid-1999 he moved to Wilmington, N.C. to be close to the thriving movie industry. Since then he has published three novels, "...And God Loved", "1928", and "Looking for You". C.S. is a graduate of N.C. Wesleyan University with a Bachelor's degree in Marketing and a Master's degree in Business Administration.

Book preview

If you could kick the person

in the pants responsible for most of your trouble,

you wouldn't sit for a month.

Theodore Roosevelt

Also by C.S. Alexander

...And God Loved

1928

Sweet Child O' Mine

It was that last second, that last breath-taking moment where I knew I was not going to win. I looked to my right as my daughter held my hand, squeezing the bejesus out of it, with her eyes closed tightly as if her top row of eyelashes were trying to suffocate the bottom ones.  I looked around to check if I could see the other nominees, though most of them were seated much closer to the front than we were.  That is the way it works at the Academy Awards, and I was just a first-time director with a small, but well-received movie called ...And God Loved.

The two presenters were both famous comedic actors.  Sherry Taintsworth, a natural redhead who adhered to the usual stereotypes and cultural norms of the Ginger people, was the one doing most of the presenting.  I had always liked her because her jokes had a goal or followed up on a cause.  On the other hand, her fellow presenter was Es-Car-Go, an obese comedian whose claim to fame was starring in a movie about a hustler from the hard streets of Raleigh, North Carolina who may or may not have used twenty kilos of cocaine to help save an orphanage...or doughnut house.  I don’t know, I stopped caring because all I could think about when I watched the trailer was how he had to be close to losing a leg, or at least a foot to diabetes.

‘Oh my God, no!’ I yelled inside my head as the rotund comedian pulled the card from the envelope.  At least six to eight drops of sweat descended from his forehead onto the priceless keepsake for whoever won the award.

Uh...someone must have missed his trip to the Western Union to pay the utility bill because it's hot in this honey sac, ya know what I'm sayin'? he mused.  The crowd gave an obligatory laugh, but it was ninety-five percent super wealthy white people, and let’s be honest, most of them probably think Western Union is a country music band from California.

Ya need some back-up there Mr. Go? Mr. Scar-Go?  I don’t really know which one to call you because they are both terrible? Taintsworth chuckled.  Once again, the comedian stalled even longer, grandstanding and making his moment in front of millions of people go on for longer than it should, glaring at her and making her laugh.

And the winner is, he said before inhaling another large breath, "Stephen Tulley for ...And God Loved."  It was one of those moments where that weird feeling of a warm liquid is being poured onto your brain and then it quickly flows down to the rest of your body while your hairs stand up as if they are saluting when it passes each one.  I turned to my daughter, who is sixteen years old, and caught her right in the moment when she finally opened her eyes and the words, ‘holy shit’ fell from her lips.  She turned to me and threw her arms around my neck.  This was a big deal for her too because of what we went through to get here.  My daughter was and always will be the number one female in my life.  Since her mother and I split up three years ago, she has become my rock.

Dad, get up!  Go!  You gotta go! Go on stage, she whisper-yelled in my ear.

Come with me!  I whisper-yelled back.  Then her eyebrows furrowed while her nose and lips scrunched up as she mouthed a very apparent, NO.  The moment was brief, but packed full of emotions and information to process...as is every other second of my life.  I am very hyperactive, especially in the brain, but we can cover that later.  Right now I need to stand up and walk on stage in front of tens of millions of people to collect this award...and I don’t know what the hell to say because I never thought I would win.

As I stood up, it didn’t even cross my mind that I had been sitting cramped for so long that my legs were asleep.  I am six foot two, so my legs are just long enough to barely fit anywhere.  I can tell you that if I didn’t do what I was about to do next, the only thing anyone would remember about me from this moment was how I immediately dropped to the floor.  It was like trying to get a Raggedy Andy doll to stand by himself.  Quickly others rushed to my side, but mostly A- and B+ actors because we were so far back.  Seriously, you aren’t going to see Clooney or Oprah rushing from the first row to see if I was okay.  Luckily, I handled it with dignity by pointing to my legs and then making the two-hand sleep gesture to the side of my face.  Out of my peripheral vision, I could see there were some chuckles while others were more dramatic by covering their eyes as if to avert attention from something that was purely an unfortunate moment for another human being...and for some reason that got to me.

I made it on stage without any additional miscues or legs crumbling beneath me.  Taintsworth hugged me and whispered into my ear, You okay? and the only thing I could think to say was, Like mashed potatoes, right?  Her laugh was forced and as uncomfortable as I was—wondering why I had just compared the moment to comfort food.  Deadweight, breathing hard, and looking like he required some oxygen, handed the trophy to me.  What the hell am I going to say?

Wow, this is completely unexpected, I mustered.  Hello, is Nick Cliché calling, I thought, chastising myself.  This project was something that started many years ago while I was studying at North Carolina Wesleyan as I pondered what happened after my uncle took his own life.  I reflected the thoughts of what my mother and grandmother were experiencing as they grappled between their love for a brother and a son and the faith they have for their religion.  It was then that... and for some reason, I stopped in the middle of the sentence.  This entire scenario seemed pointless, and I couldn’t get the thought of some of these people snickering or averting their eyes because they felt embarrassed for me, rather than reach out to me and show me love and kindness.  My first instinct would have been to rush over to me and offer what help I could and if I happened to be sitting in the front row, then I would step out to make sure I was okay.  Who cares what anyone thinks?  I turned to the hot camera (the one with the red light on), pointed my finger at it, and made a gesture as if I were pushing a button Pause, I said.  It felt as if I were pausing the world and the crowd was now curious and enthralled wondering if I had lost my mind.  Maybe I had.

Shelby, I said as I looked past the sea of celebrities who now were obviously confused.  Slowly they all turned their heads to see who I was speaking to only to find my daughter now firmly with the cameras planted on her as she looked horrified that I would suddenly and unexpectedly throw the spotlight onto her.  While I was not intending to cause my daughter any undue pressure, what I realized at that moment was that none of this mattered.  The glamour, the celebrities, this award was now going to allow me to make a very hefty paycheck from the next project.  Okay, so maybe that part isn’t so bad, but I didn’t care about connecting with anyone in the world but her.  She glared at me with an awkward teen smile and I continued as I saw the stage manager give me the signal to wrap it up.  It’s just you and me and has been since your mother and I split up.  You have been there for me and I hope you feel that I have been there for you.  I am so sorry your mother and I couldn’t work out, but we tried. I promise you we tried.  I know it has been almost three years, but I have never felt more regret in my life than robbing you of your childhood and the chance to have both parents present.  This award, I said holding it up and staring at it briefly, it’s meaningless without you.  This life feels meaningless without you and that is way too much pressure to put on a kid.  I am so proud of you and how you have handled so much pressure with so much dignity.  I don’t know how the future will play out.  I don’t know if I will ever find love again.  I hope so, I really do.  But I need you to know that no matter what, you will always be the most important woman in my life.  Thank you for being you and the best daughter a dad could ever hope for, then in some weird sense of following a fake protocol, I turned to the camera making a gesture as if to push the button again, and said, Unpause, and continued my earlier train-of-thought.  ...I decided to write a story that might challenge a more common way of thinking and present an idea of how our faith and the truth of reality can coexist.  Thank you so much for this award, I will cherish it always.  With that, I followed Taintsworth and Deadweight off the stage.  I wanted to look back at the crowd so badly, but I kept focused on the floor in front of me and headed stage right.  There was applause initially, but then something weird happened.  The applause grew louder and louder until it was thunderous, right as I was passing the curtain to the backstage area.  I finally lifted my head and there was a production assistant, dressed in black, trying to get my attention.  What? I asked.  I wasn’t sure if she was mute or had been ordered not to utter a word during the telecast, but her finger spoke volumes as she looked like she was aggressively pushing a doorbell.  I turned around and looked back out over the crowd.  They were giving a standing ovation, but it wasn’t to me.  They had all turned to my daughter and were applauding her.  The moment overwhelmed me and like the big softy I am, tears were flowing down my cheeks.  My feet involuntarily had me walking back on stage, even as the production assistant tried to grab me.  I walked back out on stage, the music was already playing to indicate the moment was over, and still, the crowd continued to applaud.  There I was on the corner of the stage, tears streaming down my cheeks as I joined in with them.  For the life of me, I didn’t understand what was happening.  Finally, Shelby stood up, raised her hand to the crowd, and she just lost it.  She began to sob and that is all it took for me to break every bit of Academy Award protocol as I leaped from the stage and ran to her.  ‘I need to make a bigger movie next time so we can sit closer to the front,’ I thought out loud as arthritis in my right knee gave me its version of the middle finger after landing from my stage jump.  When I finally reached Shelby, I hugged her and held her so tight I thought I was saying goodbye forever.  She whispered into my ear,

Oh my God, I love you, but this is super embarrassing.  That made me laugh and I turned to everyone, raised my hand in thanks, and then sat down with her, which prompted the rest of the audience to do the same.  The moment was over, but it was just the beginning of this story.

Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go

Waking up in the morning after an Academy Award win is like waking up from being really drunk and trying to remember what happened the night before and why you feel embarrassed.  Then there is the immediate and sudden realization that you MUST check your phone because you know somehow, someway, you acted like a dumbass and texted someone you shouldn’t have.  More than likely an ex-lover you had amazing sex with, but the rest of the situation wasn’t going to work.  Come on, you know exactly who I am talking about.  You don’t necessarily break up, but you sort of show you have lost interest without really cutting ties.  That way when you get drunk and horny, you can call out of the blue and offer a short-term, but valid excuse.  It’s better than being direct and saying, Sex with you is amazing, but it is the other 23 hours a day that worries me.  However, this is not one of those mornings. This morning I had in fact awakened an Academy Award winner and for Best Director at that.  Bam bam bam.  I was completely awake at this point, but you can’t just allow someone to bang on your door without causing some amount of guilt.

Huh, what?  Whose going... what is that...I mean who is it?  I mustered with garbled tongue and breath.  Yeah, I could have won Best Actor too!

Dad!  Get up!  We have to go!  When I mentioned my goal was to make whoever was banging on my door feel guilty, it's easy to see that it was now a futile act on my part.  Also, I was acting like a spoiled brat, but this day is bigger than even a birthday, so....bahahaha....let them eat cake! ...No, seriously I am not that much of an ass.  I really would like to be, some days.  A lot of days actually, but I am a parent so like many other selfish things I wish I could do... I can’t.

I swung my feet off the bed and made a B-line to the dresser where my phone was.

Holy shit, was all I could muster when I saw the first notification.  I had 1,399 new messages.  Then in normal Stephen Tulley fashion, I let it bother me that I needed one more to get to 1,400 so where was it?

You have one new message and 1,399 unread messages, my phone said right on cue.

Cheers! I answered back.  Based on the heaviness of my daughter’s hand as it banged the shit out my door this morning, I figured I didn’t have time to read any of them.  I just won the Academy Award for Best Director so more than likely Shelby had a zillion interviews lined up.  Oh yeah, that is sort of a crucial element to this story.  My daughter is my manager and agent.  Yes, you are reading that correctly and yes, I did write earlier that she is only sixteen years old.  Why do you think they gave her a standing ovation?  It's a romantic notion to think the crowd just wanted to offer additional love after a father's very public testament to his daughter, but this is Hollywood.  Every one of those A-listers knows good and damn well that Shelby is going to be a heavy hitter in the next few years.  This is the entertainment business, and they all know their careers might depend on how she is feeling as a seventeen-year-old, on a Monday afternoon while drinking a latte, reading a script, and having agents buzz in her ear about how their clients are the perfect fit for the part.  God help the asshole who is pushy.

I want to tell you how the legend of Shelby Tulley began and the incredible part is it is true, however first I need to catch you up on the hows and whys of my relationship with her.  My daughter, like her mother and father, does not have a sibling.  Apparently, this is an odd thing as I continually get weird reactions when I reveal this fact to others.  It’s as if people are staring at two adults who made a terrible life decision.  You know, the same way WE looked at everyone who has more than one.  What in God’s name were they thinking?  When do you get anything done?  I remember working with a guy named Tom a few years ago and he revealed to me quite eagerly that he had ten children.  I never trusted him after that because anyone who decides to have ten children has to have something wrong with him.  I’m sorry, but you apparently make bad life decisions no matter how completely happy your kids, you, and everyone else around you appear to be.  BTW, you will see I apparently use the word apparently a lot.  Editors be damned, muhahaha!  Let’s get back to the subject at hand.

As an only child, when you are expecting what you know without a doubt is going to be your only child, it becomes a really neat time in your life where you start to bond with your parent(s) in a way you never had before.  When we found out that Celie (short for Marga Celie) was pregnant, my Dad was in the hospital getting his heart checked out.  The year prior he had experienced a minor myocardial infarction or in regular people's terms, a mild heart attack.  One of his arteries had near 100% blockage so a stint had been surgically placed (instead of magically?) fixing the problem.  The month before in June, Dad had participated in a nuclear treadmill test and the doctor’s analysis was that Dad’s heart was doing just fine.  However, a month later he was having chest pains and was admitted to Forsyth Memorial so they could monitor him.  I wanted to be there in person to tell him and Mom about Celie being pregnant, but I was worried...and that is such a shitty type of worry...is your parent going to die?

Can you hear us? I asked.

Yes, we have you on speakerphone, Mom said.  I think she knew what was coming because it wasn’t like Celie and I hadn’t been trying to get pregnant for the prior year-and-a-half.

Dad?

I’m here, he answered.  I could tell from his voice that he was tired, but fully awake.

Well, we wanted to let you both know that you are going to be grandparents.

Oh, my Goodness! my mom exclaimed in her sweet first-grade-teacher Southern accent.

That’s super, son! Dad said.

How far are you? What do we know about sex?  I had zero doubt that this would be my mother’s first couple of questions.

Well we tried for over a year-and-a-half so we pushed it pretty far to stay interested, but yeah overall the sex has been great, I answered.  Celie’s forearm moved swiftly through the air, cutting it like a Samurai sword and landing square on my chest, causing me to cough as if I were choking.  I wanted to react accordingly, but her brows were so furrowed that they could floss her teeth.  Imagine a very attractive woman, who happened to be brown (African-American or woman-of-color for you politically correct people who obviously have never been in a mixed relationship), a healthy thin, with huge beautiful eyes that could pierce your soul when she got judgmental.

No ma’am, we DO NOT know the gender and the doctor said I am about nine weeks along.  Wow, I can still remember her looking at me with those angry, frustrated eyes and thinking, ‘I hope the rumor that the second trimester is a good one is true.’  I am pretty sure she was looking at me thinking, ‘Thank God he has good genes.’"

Well, that’s great, son.  I am really happy for you both.  I know what you are thinking.  This is the part where you read that this was the last time I ever spoke to my Dad, but I wouldn’t do that to you and it wasn’t.  In fact, Dad got out of the hospital a day later and was back to feeling like himself so quickly that we drove down to Winston-Salem within a couple of weeks.  There were two reasons this trip still stands out so prominently in my mind.  Number one, it was the first time we had gone out as a family together.  Sure, Shelby was the size of a peanut, but we were still together.  We saw a matinee showing of Pirates of the Caribbean II at the Wynsong 16 in Winston-Salem over by Hanes Mall.  Then we had lunch at Fudruckers and I remember how it wasn’t as good as the one in Myrtle Beach.  The second thing was that it was the last weekend I ever saw my dad alive.  It wasn’t predictable to us either.

I could go into the details of what happened, but what’s the point?  It doesn’t bring him back and you didn’t spend your hard-earned cash to read a sad story.  I promise you that this is a love story, so I will give you bullet points to keep the sadness to a minimum.

●   

My best friend Dante stepped up and solidified the label I gave him.

●   

My mom and I both had to experience, in different ways, one of the greatest losses and gains within six months after Shelby was born.

●  It was the beginning of the loneliest period of my life.

When Shelby was born, I didn’t even want to look at her.  Believe it or not, it took two weeks before I gazed upon her with loving eyes.  It wasn’t that I hated her or even felt anything that could remotely be categorized as negative, I just didn’t feel anything.  I was still numb over Dad’s death and now that he wasn’t here to be my dad as I became a father, I felt lost.  I was told over and over again how he was there watching over us, but I think people say that to make themselves feel better.  It did not affect me.  Then it hit me one day while I was looking down at her—shortly after a diaper change when the hairs in my nose finally uncurled and I felt I could actually hold my lunch down.  I don’t know about you but changing a baby’s diapers alone is enough to create a barrier to having additional offspring.  She smiled at me and I knew in that instant that I would love her forever.

After that, I wish I could say that I suddenly became a great father, and it was my daughter and me forever.  While I consider myself a great Dad now, as does my ex-wife who admitted so during our mediation hearing, my learning curve was wide.  I was still reeling from the loss of my father and could not pull myself out of it.  Shelby’s mom, while being a beautiful, dependable, organized, and diligent person, is not someone who naturally feels empathy.  There are times in married life when you need your spouse to step up and be an emotional kickstand for you.  You need her to show you love, kindness, and support even when she gets tired of it because that is what love is—at least that is what I had always thought it was supposed to be.  When you love someone, and truly are in love with that person, you understand that the emotional burden is yours as well because it just feels natural.  When they hurt, you hurt.  That is part of what makes you both a team of strength and love and creates the bonds that will hold the family together when times get bad.  Celie is simply not that kind of girl.

For the next six months, I slept upstairs in the finished room over the garage, crying myself to sleep every single night.  I mourned my father uncontrollably at times and needed someone to be an emotional support system, but there was no one.  I felt worse because, in turn, I was a terrible support system for my mother.  I couldn’t turn to