For a short while, I think there was a Box Boy, though I heard he was very androgynous. Then again, I have no idea what he looked like, or what any of the other Box People do either. Our schedules never overlap; I get their texts and emails asking to cover shifts, but aside from that, they are as faceless to me as the maids who turn down the sheets. The Standard hosted a Christmas party one year, but it was still hard to tell. Is she a Box Girl? Is she? Is she a random guest? A hotel employee? Everyone in West Hollywood looks so similar anyway. It was impossible to know.
Prep
My 1989 BMW sputters into The Standard’s valet driveway and takes its place in line with BMWs from this century. An eager young man in a snug-fitting shirt asks if I’m a guest of the hotel.
“Box Girl,” I say, while gathering my things from the passenger-side seat.
“Oh, right!” he says, pretending to recognize me. I am sure we all start to look the same after a while.
The valets are all very fit young men. Actors, presumably. Aspiring actors. The service industry in Los Angeles has got to be one of the best looking, whitest-toothed bunches in the world. (Sometimes, during breaks from the box, I’ll strike up a conversation with another employee in the cafeteria—a valet, a bellhop, a room service deliverer. “So what brought you to LA?” I’ll ask, while sucking down a Diet Coke and shoving a handful of dry cereal in my mouth. Every time the answer is the same: acting.)
The guy in the snug-fitting shirt gets in my car and hands me a valet ticket.
I head to the bathroom, which is my first stop, always. I brush my hair, put on lip gloss, and apply thigh-firming lotion. Then I smile and pick whatever food I ate on the way to the hotel out of my teeth. Tonight it’s a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich, and I’m kicking myself for forgetting a toothbrush, again, since a large portion of the sandwich still seems to be stuck in the sides of my mouth.
A deejay is setting up her equipment in a booth to the left of the box. This is a relief. For about a year, there was live music in the lobby bar. Music is a stretch. I am no songbird, but this singer must have been friends with someone who worked at the hotel because there is no way anyone would have booked this person based on his abilities. He sounded like a dying whale, or maybe a whale sending a mating call. I’m not sure if there’s a huge difference. Every Wednesday, without fail, he’d do this rendition of Radiohead’s “High and Dry” that could peel the paint off the walls.
When I leave for the night, the valet will tell me my tires are dangerously bald.
“Thanks,” I’ll say. “I’ll get those checked.”
“No, not checked,” he’ll say. “You need new tires.”
An Emotional Detroit
My dad still sends clippings the old-fashioned way. Not by forwarding a link, but by digging scissors out of his desk, cutting out an article, circling the important parts, stuffing it in a manila envelope, and driving to the post office. It’s one of his many endearing Andy Rooney-esque quirks.
While cleaning out my desk, I came across a photocopied page from a 2006 issue of Forbes. It was a list of famous quotes about Los Angeles, and at the top of the page, in my dad’s all-caps scrawl, it said: FOR L.A. PIG, LOVE DAD. (He’s always called me “Pig” or “Porkchop” or some other member of the swine family.) At the time that he mailed this, I had been living in LA for almost two years. He put a star next to his favorites:
* “California is a fine place to live—if you happen to be an orange.”
—FRED ALLEN
* “Hollywood: An emotional Detroit.”
—LILLIAN GISH
* “Only remember—west of the Mississippi it’s a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.”
—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
* “Living in Hollywood is like living in a lit cigarette butt.”
—PHYLLIS DILLER
* “Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees.”
—DAVID LETTERMAN
As I re-read these quotes I could hear my dad laughing—just howling, his high-pitched honk of a laugh—as he scratched each asterisk into the page.
Oh the Horror
Los Angeles is not a place I ever thought I would reside. Growing up on the East Coast, in very comfortable corners of Georgia and Connecticut, LA—or La La Land, or Hollywood—was not a place you lived. If anything, it was a place you read about in the tabloids and made fun of. In the beginning, when people asked why I moved here, I said I lost a bet. In actuality the decision was much less impulsive than that: It was decided over a couple bottles of white wine while eating lunch.
To my dad’s horror and utter bewilderment, he and my mom (a chemical engineering major with an MBA and the recipient of a master’s degree in biology, respectively) raised two English majors. My dad was successful in the pulp and paper business and retired very young. My mom is hardworking in her own right, with the framed certificate in our laundry room to prove it: “Connecticut Volunteer of The Year.” My parents were not ones to put a lot of pressure on their children—it wasn’t like we had to grow up to do this, or had to become a “that,” but there were still certain unspoken expectations. My brother at least took his BA in English down a lucrative tract: He worked on Wall Street, got an MBA, and ended up back in New York, where he works in finance. While my parents knew I loved to write, they assumed I would also move to New York and get a job in publishing. I had assumed the same thing. Thus I spent all summer after graduation living at home in Connecticut, attending informational interviews in Manhattan, not knowing that “informational” means, “We don’t have a job for you, but we’ll give you ten minutes of our time.” I spent these meetings fielding comments like, “University of Colorado, huh? Big party school I hear,” while shifting uneasily in ill-fitting pantsuits from Ann Taylor Loft.
Late that summer, I went to Los Angeles with Heather, my best friend from college, to visit our other best friend, Rachel. Heather and Rachel were also living with their parents, looking for jobs: Heather in the suburbs of Chicago, Rachel in a suburb of LA. Frustrated by the incessant refreshing of our Hotmail inboxes and the waiting helplessly to hear from jobs we’d applied to on Monster.com, Heather and I had decided a weeklong vacation in LA was just what the therapist ordered.
Everything about Los Angeles was intoxicating on that inaugural trip. The whole place seemed dream-like, foreign, and fabulous, if not a little bit filthy. I was certain I was going to see a celebrity as soon as I got off the plane. Rachel was our tour guide, and she took us to the Santa Monica Pier, the Venice Boardwalk, the Sky Bar on Sunset Boulevard. As the week went on, an idea began brewing: Why did Heather and I have to get a job in our hometowns’ neighboring metropolises? Why would we split up when we could cling to each other while entering adulthood? “Let’s just move here!” We threw it out there, but we knew we never would. We were too scared—to tell our parents, to leave the boyfriends and lives and expectations that were waiting for us back home.
Yet, on the penultimate day of our trip, during a late lunch at The Farm in Beverly Hills, something shifted. Maybe it was the sunshine, maybe it was the Sauvignon Blanc, but giddy and high on friendship and wine, the decision was made: “Let’s move here. Let’s really move here.” The three of us could get a place together. We decided we had to call our parents immediately, before we changed our minds. I walked to the corner of Beverly and Santa Monica Boulevards—an intersection I cannot pass without remembering this excruciating conversation—and told my parents I was moving three time zones and 2,963 miles west; as far from Connecticut as I possibly could without wading into the Pacific.
Within three weeks, Heather and I had moved across the country, with no jobs, no cars, and no place to live. This nearly broke my sweet, Southern mother’s heart. (Both my parents are originally from Georgia, with the accents to prove it.) She had assumed I would get a job in Manhattan, of course. California might as well have been another country in my par
ents’ minds. And Los Angeles, oh the horror. At least San Francisco was tolerable, they’d say. Soon after I moved, my mom called to tell me she had to close the door to my bedroom. “I just couldn’t bear to look at it, knowing you are so far away.”
The first few weeks we lived in LA, we didn’t really live in LA at all, but rather with Rachel’s parents in a San Fernando Valley suburb called Encino. We were familiar with Brendan Fraser in Encino Man, but not this city where Michael Jackson grew up. We quickly learned that it was not such a bad spot to be stuck in late summer while looking for a job. Rachel’s parents’ house was a sprawling, contemporary take on the Southern California ranch house. It had a large, slate-tile hot tub, an eco-friendly saltwater pool, and a variety of California vegetables growing in the yard, not to mention all the home-cooked food and expensive wine we could consume.
Most of our job-search period was spent in the pool. Once or twice a day, I’d flutter-kick to the shallow end, peel my waterlogged limbs off my inflatable raft, twist a towel under my arms, and shuffle inside to refresh my email on their boxy, beige desktop, my hair dripping onto the keyboard. (This was 2004, when checking your email enlisted more physical labor than just rolling over on a chaise lounge and shading your iPhone’s screen from the sun.) Realizing I’d gotten no responses to my job inquiries, I’d grab an organic Popsicle from the freezer and hurry back poolside to avoid getting chilled from the air conditioning.
Unfortunately, after three weeks, we found jobs. We moved to Santa Monica because it was the only part of LA any of us had ever heard of, and I’m fairly certain that had something to do with a late-’90s Sheryl Crow song. Our apartment building was a shutter-less stucco box, painted a shade of warm salmon, the address written in loopy, spearmint cursive. It looked like something out of Sinatra-era Palm Springs, just shittier. We were pleasantly surprised to find the windows had no screens, because apparently there are no bugs in California, but less pleased to learn the apartment came with no refrigerator, because apparently LA renters are expected to lug those along as if they were fresh towels or a new set of sheets.
There is a whole underground market for used refrigerators in LA. We found ours on Craigslist, where we found most everything those days—our couch, a coffee table, my 1989 BMW convertible with a CD player that skipped when I drove over bumps. Armed with a wad of cash, which was no doubt split three ways—as if we planned on dividing the fridge three ways when we moved into our own one-bedroom apartments a year later—we met the sellers on a manicured corner of San Vicente Boulevard. (For at least a year, we called San Vicente and Abbott Kinney “The Bermuda Triangle” because, unlike every other street in LA that shoots pin-straight until eternity, these boulevards defiantly existed on diagonals, crissing and crossing other sane streets, leaving virgin LA drivers like us feeling as though we’d just been spun around blindfolded before a whack at the piñata.)
The refrigerator transaction took place on a Sunday morning. As the couple waited for us, a handsome dog panted alongside, attached to a leash that had been needle-pointed with someone’s initials. They looked like they had just finished a workout. Probably a hike. Twenty minutes late, we rolled up in various shades of hungover. I think it’s a decent bet that at least one of us wasn’t wearing a bra. The couple stood there smiling with their fridge, which was on a dolly. They owned a dolly. They said their new place came with its own fridge. Of course it did. They were in their late twenties, maybe early thirties—it was hard to tell back then—and they clearly had their shit together. I wiped under my eyes to remove the remnants of last night’s mascara and wondered if I’d ever be that put together on a Sunday morning. I bet they had already read The New York Times. Probably over a soy latte at an impossibly hip, fair-trade coffee shop after their hike.
But we weren’t quite sure how to be adults yet. Our four years at The University of Colorado (we affectionately called it The Harvard of The Rockies) hadn’t armed us with much but liberal arts degrees and a superhuman ability to funnel beers at a high altitude. I studied journalism, which I’m not even sure is a major anymore; Rachel majored in painting, and I’ll leave that at that; and Heather majored in the “smart” slacker specialty: sociology. A few weeks before our pre-move trip to LA, Heather had a meeting with a career counselor and took one of those aptitude tests that says what you should do with the rest of your life. She called me crying from the parking lot immediately after. Through the crying/hyperventilating/mini panic attack that is the wheelhouse of recent grads, she said the counselor told her that she didn’t really have any career options, and that she probably should have thought about that before she decided to major in sociology. And that she should just go kill herself. (Heather added that part.)
Shortly after we moved into our apartment, a Penske truck arrived with all of our belongings: whatever furniture was salvageable after four years of “Jungle Juice” parties in Boulder, our favorite books, framed pictures of our families, and five-pound Case Logics of CDs housing our entire music collections, which were nothing if not varied. (You know you’re a child of the ’90s when you can say you listened to the Grateful Dead and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony with equal gusto.) While unpacking boxes of “necessities”—the enormous black stereo with the equally sizable speakers attached by a tangle of wires, the Halloween costumes that only follow you across a continent when you’re twenty-two and think that makes sense—we began to assemble our new adult lives. Or some pathetic attempt at them.
This was around the time I convinced my friend Melissa to move to LA, too. Melissa and I grew up in Connecticut together, and she spent her first four un-chaperoned years attending Georgetown University, getting a good education. Thus, she already had a job in New York. I had promised her that as soon as I found a job, we’d get an apartment together in the city. Well, I told her on the phone from California, I never found a job there, so instead I moved to LA, a mere three time zones away. This wouldn’t be a big deal, right? We could still live together! We have a great house! There’s plenty of room for you! Your job will transfer you, right? Great. Pick you up at the Long Beach Jet Blue terminal in what, a week? Super.
Shockingly, after a week of not returning my calls because she was so livid, Melissa caved and said yes. It was now September and she had been living at home since May, making the hour commute from Connecticut to midtown Manhattan via Metro North. Earlier that summer, we met during her lunch break, and I inquired where she had purchased that snazzy navy skirt suit. She told me Talbots, and then said, “My life is over.” During that phone call from California, I might have mentioned that no one wears skirt suits out here. I didn’t even think they had Talbots. I also think I mentioned the words “beach” and “cute boys.” With that, she was packing up her Case Logic, too.
To create space for Melissa, Heather and I decided to share a room. The master was enormous, and our rent would be cheaper that way. As if two twenty-two-year-old women sharing a bedroom wasn’t juvenile enough, one of the first things we both unboxed were our teddy bears, which we immediately perched atop our peach and purple pillows. Heather’s bear was named Amie, after the Pure Prairie League song “Amie.” (Heather and her mom were obsessed with the softer side of late-’70s rock. Heather once punched me in the arm, pretty damn hard, when I casually mentioned that Jackson Browne sucked.) My furry friend, Gundy, was not named after a song but after his brand, Gund. Not my most creative moment. It’s not that surprising; I was never particularly kind to my inanimate friends as a child. All my Barbies got brutal haircuts within the first few weeks I plied them from their plastic wombs, and one night, my brother and I lynched my largest baby doll with a noose made of shoelaces. We hung her out my bedroom window, swinging triumphantly in front of the dining room window, while our parents were mid–dinner party.
As a child, I also had to sleep with absolutely no light—not even the slightest crack creeping under the door—while The Nutcracker soundtrack played on my robot-shaped cassette player. Looking back, I realize thi
s was sort of unsettling music for a child before bedtime. In the room with Heather, it wasn’t The Nutcracker that unnerved me, but “Cinnamon Girl” by Neil Young, the first few bars of which played full-blast every morning at 6:45 from her CD-player alarm clock. I still can’t hear the song’s beginning chords without feeling an overwhelming impulse to get in the shower.
It was hard to believe we ever complained about 11:00 am classes. As it turned out, with real jobs, you had to show up much earlier than that. Every day. And not still wearing the shirt you slept in with a Patagonia fleece zipped over it. Melissa’s company transferred her position in marketing to their office on Wilshire Boulevard. I took a job as an assistant at a talent agency, and Rachel got a job as a personal assistant, working for a woman who ended up being certifiably insane. By winter, Rachel had become suspicious that this woman might just be using her for a free place to stay in Park City during Sundance. Rachel finally quit in the spring when one of the woman’s checks bounced and, in what we can plainly call the final straw, the woman’s toddler son peed on her during a business trip to Berkeley. Heather got a toddler-free job as the receptionist at a post-production office, where she is now a producer and makes more money than all of us. (Take that, career counselor.)
At the post-production office, one of Heather’s responsibilities was ordering lunch and dinner for the clients, who were stuck in bays editing commercials all day. She ordered from the best restaurants in Santa Monica, and she always ordered way too much. She must have done this intentionally—well played, Heather—because almost every night, she’d arrive home with giant catering containers and zip-locked bags full of gourmet leftovers. Sometimes, if it were someone’s birthday, the vast majority of a very large sheet cake would make it into our kitchen. The four of us would sit on the couch, free food on our laps, watching So You Think You Can Dance while drinking mugs full of Yellowtail Shiraz purchased from the CVS down the street. (Why was it always mugs at that age? Why didn’t we ever have clean and/or proper glassware?) We went out to bars some nights, went out to dinner even less. We were paralyzed by the fear of managing our own money for the first time, and even more terrified of being hungover at work.
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