by Marcy Gordon
Our next move brought us to a thrift shop. When I spotted an entire wall rack filled with Lacoste polos, I freaked out. All colors perfectly arranged like the rainbow. My jaw dropped, and I started laughing. Then I hugged the shirts.
“Oh my God, I’m in heaven!” I exclaimed. At the same time I thought, I’m high as hell! I tried on one of every color.
The sales lady piled up stacks outside the dressing room. I threw them on two at a time, popping up the bottom collar over the top one for a layered effect. For an hour, I modeled in the mirror.
I got higher and higher. Gaining control of myself for moments at a time, it occurred to me how high I actually was before my mind floated back to space. I couldn’t stop grinning, a sign real stoners call “perma-grin.” I thought I would never be normal again; this would never wear off. My brain tingled. I opened my mouth and stretched it into big circles. In that dressing room, I morphed into a kid who discovered her shadow for the first time.
“Jan,” I said. “I feel liked I’m getting hugged, not physically—but psychologically. Let’s get something to eat!”
“Ooo, falafels!” Jan shouted for all to hear.
When most young Americans venture out into the world for the first time, an incredible thing happens—they discover Middle Eastern cuisine. Doner kebabs. Hummus. Falafels. And hookahs. All foreign objects to me in Missouri.
“What time is it?” I asked.
Jan laughed at her watch, “Seventy eleven o’clock. So like two P.M. or something?”
Our Amsterdam adventure totaled two hours. It seemed like ten.
Tack on the extra hour it took us to order and eat the damn falafel because Jan and I couldn’t control the giggles. We spent only a half hour eating it, during which we proclaimed, at the same sitting, our love and disgust for the meal. A few bites in, Jan tossed the cucumber-sauce-soaked wax paper into the trash and we went back to the main road.
The second the cafe door shut, my mood swung from perma-grin to paranoia. Terrible thoughts raced into my head as the sun set.
“Where are we?”
“Why is that man staring at us? Has he been following us?”
“What if someone breaks into our room and steals our stuff?”
Wait a minute. What room? As we carried our oversized backpacks with us, it dawned on me that we hadn’t booked a hostel.
I grabbed Jan and flung us into the nearest hotel. Cost wasn’t an issue. Mom and Dad could worry about that bill. I remained too paranoid about people stealing my polo shirts. Once we booked lodging, Jan left me inside to get more munchies. She discovered chocolate Hit cookies. I discovered Euro MTV.
We ate every cookie and passed out. We woke up in the exact clothes from the previous day with MTV still blaring. I rolled over onto cookie crumbs and crumpled receipts to check the clock. My hair smelled like an ashtray. My ponytail wrestled its way to the right side of my head. My mascara smeared to my cheekbones.
I had a hangover like no other—one nauseated by guilt. The whole “oops-I-ate-a-hash-bar-and-got-stoned-off-my-ass-for-hours story” was not the respectable proof of money well spent that I needed.
Jan rolled over, “What time is it?
“It’s time to get up. We’re going to an art museum,” I said.
Katie Eigel is a digital marketing professional—whatever that means. Originally from Missouri, she has lived in Chicago, Switzerland, San Francisco, Arizona, and currently New York city. When not city hopping, she enjoys splurging on wine and traveling on the cheap. You can follow her adventures on Twitter @eieigel.
JESSICA LANGLOIS
Karma at the Colombo Airport
It’s best to keep your karma within reach—in your carry-on bag.
It was all too clear, when I came down with a violent, upwardly mobile stomach bug on my last day in South Asia, that I had accrued some seriously bad karma.
My episode of feet-slapping, stomach-buckling sprints to the bathroom, cloaked in the midnight steam room heat of our Colombo apartment, began just hours before our flight back to Los Angeles, after seven weeks in Sri Lanka—on the one day we didn’t eat street food but splurged on a beachfront fancy restaurant with a Frenchy name. The chances that this food on this day would make me sick were too absurd.
Besides, we were in a country of tens of thousands of Buddha statues, in which saffron-clad monks are the highest-class rank, and everything happens for a reason.
Halfway through the trip, my partner, Aruna, who is Sri Lankan by blood and literally begins to glow after a few weeks in the heat and humidity, got laid up for three days in our Colombo apartment with his own nasty, delirium-inducing stomach bacteria. After he recovered, I trilled on about having a stomach of steel and being safe from all manner of invasive critters because I was a vegetarian.
A few weeks after that, Aruna and I lied, saying I was sick, to get out of one of many compulsory audiences with a group of extremely extended family members. When they showed up at our door in Kandy anyway, offering stackable stainless steel containers of rice and curry, we were caught, red-faced and ashamed, and I found myself putting on a good show of having a fit of loose bowels.
So really, it made a lot of sense that I would be hit with a day of “nonstop vomiting,” as Aruna’s mother knowingly called it, just in time for our thirty-hour journey home.
When it got to the point that I couldn’t stand up straight and couldn’t even keep down the lime and garlic tincture a local friend made for me, we knew we couldn’t just wait it out. But it was 3 A.M., the Ayurvedic clinic next door didn’t have an emergency division, and there were no hospitals listed in the Lonely Planet. Luckily, the taxi we had reserved to take us to the airport was able to come early and knew of a private clinic. Ten dollars and a couple suppositories later—prescribed by a steely woman doctor who asked me only my first name, my age, and my symptoms, and administered by a nurse who looked to be about fourteen-years old—we were on our way to the Bandaranaike International Airport.
The good news was, thanks to a tactic I had devised of hanging half-mast, Uttanasana-style and quietly moaning, I made it through two hours of waiting in line for check-in and customs without puking on anyone. Well, almost.
Just as our customs official was scrutinizing our passports, carefully stamping and initialing this and that, it became clear I could last no longer.
Even though I’m pretty sure this a high-ranking sign you’re a terrorist, I dropped my carry-on, grabbed my passport from the official’s hands and galloped, convulsively bucking, toward the terminal. Aruna stammered apologies behind me as I begged an unsympathetic luggage clerk, “Bathroom?!” without breaking my gait.
It’s amazing how quickly the mind works when you’re about to vomit. I imagine this lucidity is akin to “life flashing before your eyes” as you await death, or “going internal” just as you’re about to give birth.
Something inside me calculated the exact seconds I had until eruption, and, like the Terminator’s computerboard mind identifying John Connors, I zeroed in on a nearby standing ashtray as my target.
The whole mess couldn’t have been better choreographed by Danny Boyle. Just as bile was coursing up my gullet, I flung myself, long-jumper style, across the final stretch, shoving an unassuming woman in a sari out of my path, and retched a thin mixture of water and dehydration salts into the narrow receptacle.
As I whimpered, spat and snotted into the ashtray, Aruna patting my back, handing me tissues, and apologizing to the woman I’d taken down, I thought, trembling:
You win this one, Buddha. You win this one.
Jessica Langlois has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and works as a freelance journalist and instructor in English composition. Her writing has appeared in American Literary Review, the East Bay Express, and the Oakland Tribune, and she is the creative nonfiction editor for Generations Literary Journal. She is currently at work on a memoir about her mother’s life in Austria, and her and her sister’s relationships to their mysterious pater
nity. She blogs about travel, pop culture, and nostalgia at www.asupposedlyfunthing.com.
TROY RODRIGUES
Hollywood Fiction
A writer discovers what he really wants is to direct!
It’s a half-hour to midnight on New Year’s Eve and I’m standing in the private bathroom of a Hollywood night club. I tower over the well-styled mane of one of Tinsel Town’s D-list actors—whose name escapes me, because he’s a friend, of a friend, of someone I just met. He tries to induce vomiting. He gets some on my shoe and I just ignore it, as I’ve uncomfortably assumed a role as his narcotics man-servant. How I got into this club, with these people, to this moment, is some part due to indifference, boredom and chaotic fluke. It also seems to be the envy of every mediocre, next-big-thing.
But all I want is for this evening to end.
The D-list actor turns his head up from the toilet bowl and says, “Pass me the bag.” Bag? What bag? I think, “… over there,” he motions to the hand basin.
“Oh sorry,” I say, wondering why I’m apologizing? Maybe it’s because I’m unconsciously contributing to his early death, “… here you go.”
“Nice huh,” he says referring to the ornate man-bag, “I got it custom made by this guy on Sunset … they also do one for H.”
“Really? I’m more of a pot man myself.” He doesn’t get my sarcasm.
I then hear the sound of a gag and see his mop-top flip over. He’s passing out on the toilet floor, his disoriented eyes, looking up to the marble ceiling. He’s almost motionless—and I have my hands full of his accoutrements.
“I’m O.K. This shit happens to me sometimes.”
This is my cue to exit—stage left, or right—the hell out of this Hollywood drama.
It’s a slight deviation to my Los Angeles package holiday. I could be at the pre-arranged New Year’s Eve celebration near the Staples Center; enjoying a nice glass of champagne with fat middle-aged tourists and recounting the sightseeing adventures of the last few days.
They were having lobster.
It’s funny the places you can get into in Los Angeles with a foreign accent and a velvet Armani blazer. Never mind the Target jeans. If you think you belong—then people don’t assume otherwise. This half-cocked strategy, that was a departure from my norm, seemed to be working tonight.
Still, what was hard to reconcile, was going from eating baby back ribs on Santa Monica Pier that afternoon, to talking about rhinoplasty with two gorgeous actresses, earlier that night. They both had come from the Midwest to make it big in Hollywood.
“So what do you do in England?” gorgeous actress number one asked me.
“I’m from Australia, actually,” I yelled over the music. She didn’t hear me but she nodded anyway. “I’m an urban planner.”
“You’re a painter?” asked gorgeous actress number two.
“Painting—yeah I’m an artist,” I said without compunction, realizing that I wouldn’t see these people ever again. But there’s also something intoxicating about Hollywood that makes you want to exaggerate with others—to be a cooler, manufactured version of yourself.
“Oh, I love artists,” said gorgeous actress number one. I started to get it: the universal appeal to twenty-somethings of appearing to be a Bohemian fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants illusion always trumps the secure, respected, corporate clone. These thoughts helped me to justify my own Hollywood fiction for the rest of the night.
“Yeah, I do a lot of modern abstract art, but it’s writing that I love,” I said, realizing I know nothing about art.
“You’re a writer too,” one of them said—not sure who, as both they started looking the same. “Do we know any of your work?”
Normally, I can’t stand those liars, who build false expectations, lead you into emotional nirvana and then, strip it all away in an instant, but it was different in Hollywood. Everyone seemed to bullshit each other out here and maybe they needed to do this, to make life more palatable.
“Maybe—done a bit here and there.” I unsuccessfully tried to think of some magazines that they wouldn’t know. “Um, I’ve done a piece for Rolling Stone … others for GQ, um … and Harper’s Bazaar,” I said, then realizing that I’d never read Harper’s Bazaar.
“Wow,” said the same gorgeous actress, “You’re like a real writer. Can we Google some of your work?”
I was in deep shit.
“Yeah it should be on there, but um … um, it’s the Australian syndicated version of Rolling Stone you see—they just don’t make it available on the net.”
“Oh that’s too bad.”
“Never mind. I can send you a hard copy by post when I get back to Sydney if you like. How about I get your number?” I said with a cheeky smile.
With a speed akin to Clint Eastwood in some cowboy movie, they drew out business cards. In the dim light of the club I could make out glamour head-shots, the word “actress” in cursive script, contact details, and on the back—bullet-points outlining the bit parts they’d played on stage and screen.
Two hours later, I found myself speaking to four more would-be movie stars—three guys and a girl—on an eco-friendly pleather couch. They were all friends of the two gorgeous actresses.
“So are you working on anything at the moment for Rolling Stone or GQ?” asked Josh, a multi-media artist that works on Hollywood movies.
Not this again. I started to re-think my lies.
“Yeah I have a few ideas for a story but nothing developed yet—maybe something about Australian bands trying to make it in the LA music scene,” I said, trying to divert the focus to an area, I hoped, they knew little about.
“Oh that’s cool, I love Australian music. Wolfmother’s latest album is just so progressive—I have it on my iPod. Who do you think is going to be big this year?” then asked Eric, a twenty-three-year-old theatre arts graduate from NYU, now living in Culver City.
I made a mental note to self: Google “Wolfmother” when back at the hotel.
“Well they are progressive … but you know,” I said again, trying to cover-up, “I like LA music like the Red Hot Chilli Peppers—aren’t they from around here?”
“Yeah—they met in Hollywood High,” said Chris, another twenty-something too-cool-for-school non-actor, wearing a fur-lined parka and mirrored sunglasses (inside the club).
It was then the conversation went from local bands to auditions; workouts and diets for auditions; drugs for auditions and finally to sex—for auditions. I was amongst the blasé and almost mechanical discussion of making it in Hollywood. Everyone knew what was expected, and the price that needed to be paid, if you weren’t an exceptional actor.
Chris’s girlfriend, the beautiful brunette, Stacey—who was thinking of becoming a blonde, and getting her stage name legalized, told me that she didn’t go to college. Instead, she studied a three-month acting course with a well-known acting coach in LA. She seemed confident of her skills, as she assumed the pose of a celebrity being interviewed and said, “All I need is to get that break on like a sitcom or even a speaking part on a hit summer movie—and then I’ll be famous!” She laughed at this, and meant it to be tongue-in-cheek, but the rest of the group nodded in solemn agreement. I realized then, that they were not interested in developing the craft of acting, but in the fame game, and this was O.K. for them. But this was a Hollywood nightclub on New Year’s Eve, when illusion and artifice were in good supply—including my own.
Amid all my amateur and unintended fiction, I did make one slip-up that night. I asked Eric, the more intelligent one of the group, “What happens if it doesn’t work out for you as an actor in LA?”
He looked at me in disgust, covered partly by the low-light of the nightclub and said in a cool, calculated voice, “Don’t ever ask me that. The truth is, you can’t think that way—I’m going to be here until I make it big—no other options for me.” If he hadn’t said it with such conviction, I would have offered him some sort of faux-brotherly advice, that he should do something else more
fulfilling with his life. He was smart enough; law school, med school or even barber school—anything was more certain than a life chasing a one-in-a-million dream, based on looks—assuming he wasn’t an exceptional actor.
Some minutes later, the two gorgeous actresses, Josh, Eric, Chris and Stacey; as well as one of their acquaintances—and whom I only remember as the D-list actor, with a mop-top, all adjourned into a private bathroom. The D-list actor produced an ornate and somewhat gaudy man-bag.
A few more minutes later, I watched them all slowly enter a better dream, than the one they all shared.
I leave LA at eleven the next morning with the middle-aged tour group. They all seem to have had a good time in the restaurant near the Staples Center. They tell me how I missed out on the lobster, and how the German couple kept dancing all night, even when there was no music.
“Where did you go last night?” asks one of the Dutch guys. “We had lobster … and lots of single elderly ladies on the dance floor—missed your chance.” He nudges his wife.
“Probably not my thing really—more a Dutch thing I reckon.” His wife is incensed. I remember why I didn’t go with the group.
I sit watching LA slip into the distance, as the tour group starts singing show tunes on the way to Las Vegas. In my mind, I’m reliving last night. No holiday tour or Universal Studios ride could have shown me that side of Hollywood. I think of my own fiction last night, and how it enabled me to witness the LA kind: the artifice of keeping one’s dreams alive.
As we enter Nevada and see the bright lights of Las Vegas in the desert dusk. I realize that I’m going into another land of fiction—a land of wedding chapels and $4.99 buffets. Only this time it’s back to the real me.
And the lobster is included.
Troy Rodrigues is an Australian writer and photographer who has since traded his briefcase for a backpack and set forth in search of more tales of mayhem. He officially calls Sydney home, though Paris will always be a lofty aspiration.