Anup Sugunan

Then at 4 years of age, I negotiated with my parents to coming to pick us up and take us back to the US. I wasn’t worried because I was born in the states, so I was a citizen, but told them to pack my younger brother, Binu, in a suitcase so we could sneak him in. Then we rented a house in Catskill, NY, I found a really good deal and it even came with a swimming pool that made the Hudson river look like the crystal-blue Caribbean waters. I learned to ride a bike there as well as linear algebra simultaneously. Then we moved to a house in Hudson, NY where it had an apple orchard and one cherry tree. My dad managed to lose control of the riding mower and run into the, yup, you guessed it, the one cherry tree. He survived. So did the tree. And the mower, until it caught on fire later and he and his neighbors had to use the water from my kiddie pool to put it out. I hadn’t really gained perspective then, I was thinking that losing the water from the kiddie pool would be expensive cause it took eons to fill up – I know, I was there.

I went to 1st grade at Greenport Elementary. I remember coloring some farmer boy and I obviously colored him brown while everyone else in the classroom was coloring theirs “flesh color” and kinda chuckling at my choice of color, but not at all in a mean-spirited way. I think that’s when I first realized that I could empathize with Dr. Spock while on Starship Enterprise – so that was my first Halloween costume.

Then my dad joined the USAF and got us stationed at Dyess AFB in Abilene, TX when I was about 7. The main thing that I remember about that place was that there was a dead-rat smell that was coming from our front porch, my brother got pulled off of a tree by a bully, and we pissed the hell out of the neighbors when we were playing soccer (football for my cousins back in India) by kicking the crap out of the fence. Oh yeah, I also got my ass kicked for the first time by a big 4th grader named Robert at my school, Jackson Elementary. He also later stole some of my favorite Star Wars toys – that’s 2 for 2. And I also had my heart broken by a girl who didn’t know I existed. I remember she moved and I found out on the bus ride home from a friend. I was forced to walk and gloriously sing, ‘I’m all out of love’ by Air Supply to myself.

My dad got stationed at Sheppard AFB in Wichita Falls, TX and he negotiated us to going with him. I was wondering what the logic was to move to a town where one of the biggest, if not theeeeee biggest tornado in the recorded-history of this world, had hit our house and had put the roof over my brother’s room three houses down in my soon to be best friend Ashley’s swimming pool. “Twister” the movie was based on that incident, so I connected with that, it was deep and touching and so was the movie. I had my first kiss in 6th grade with Ashley’s sister, Nicole while playing spin the bottle. However, it was just a peck. My brother scored and got to go to the “5 minutes in Heaven.” He and this girl went to the romantic-getaway – a laundry closet for five minutes. I got to peck-kiss three girls – man, talk about beginners luck. I raised the bar a little too high on my first hunt.

I moved to Austin, TX to start 10th grade at William B. Travis and talked the base-commander at Bergstrom AFB to assign my dad there so he could come with us. This was the first time I actually lived in an actual “city” that had traffic jams – if only my friends in the previous small towns could see me now. I grew my hair out about 2 feet and told my parents I wanted to move to LA to be a rockstar. After cussing and discussing for 6 months, I finally got them to let me move out here to SoCal. My negotiation skills were super-sharp by this point in my life that I got my mom to chauffer me out here in our van with no windows except for the front. Just as we crossed the Arizona border in the middle of a blistering summer, the air conditioner broke. Having long hair sucked at that one point in my life. But I got over it the second we crossed the mountains and got a taste of the coastal breeze.

Then I played lead guitar in a band. Band broke up. Went to GIT in Hollywood. Got side-tracked when I met some guy in a back alley who convinced me to go to medschool. No, wait, it was my vocal coach who suggested that. I guess that was just her polite way of saying that I sucked. So I went to MiraCosta ("Behold, The Coast!") College in Oceanside, took racquetball at Palomar with a 350 pound coach who could beat anyone without moving. Then transferred to UC San Diego. Started applying to med-school and realized – hey, I love theory, but I hate clinical – too many sick people moping around in a hospital. Floundered around for a couple of years personal training, day-trading, conning people into multilevel marketing schemes, and then got into filmmaking and the rest is in my bio on my site, but it’s not as seriously written as this fine piece of classic literature.