I gave Francine my two-weeks notice, and, just like Shelly Long, she could not have been more supportive. She knew I wasn’t long for this world. Francine helped plan a going-away party on my last day of work, which landed on a Jersey Friday. It was supposed to be a civilized, drop-by-the-office-around-six-for-wine-and-cheese affair. We invited all the models, and many of them came, some bearing gifts. (I had legitimately become friends with a few of them.) One of the models (the red-headed and, it turned out, very nice “Nina”) gave me a Def Leppard CD and a bottle of Patrón. That gift, we decided, needed to be opened immediately. Within minutes, the low-key affair turned into, well, whatever you get when you mix a bunch of underweight models, tequila, and hair metal. People were dancing on the desks, and at some point, I initiated a rolling-desk-chair race. As I waited for a cab to pick me up (my car stayed there until the morning), I nudged Dave to tell him the party was over. He was passed out, facedown on his desk. For unknown reasons, his shirt was off, and a backpack was strapped to his back. His Mets T-shirt was in a heap beside his chair.
Paper Planes
Every month there is a new installation in the box, each conceptualized by a different artist. Sometimes the back wall is covered in a collage of Polaroids. Sometimes it’s painted in bold, modern stripes. Sometimes it pulses with Dan Flavinesque neon lights. While some installations are quite pleasant to be a part of—a tranquil surf video projected behind me, say—others are more unnerving.
For a month, green paper lanterns and pink plastic flowers of an undeterminable variety hung from the ceiling of the box. I couldn’t sit up without one of them hitting me on the head. While that was annoying, it was actually the least troubling part of the installation. Behind me, on the wall, were pictures of odd little dolls in poses that failed to be cute: at the beach, in a rose garden, in a wedding dress, peering over a sunflower. The worst was a picture of one doll holding a smaller, even creepier doll. No matter what these dolls were up to, their expressions remained unchanged: foreheads too large for their faces, eyes of alien proportions. Dozens of bug-eyes fixed on me, for seven hours straight.
Some installations are three-dimensional to the point of interactive. These can be a bit of a nuisance. Once, the box was filled with dozens of paper airplanes, all different shapes and sizes, hung at various heights from the ceiling by fishing line. The creator of this installation had asked that the fan be left on to create the effect that the airplanes were flying. While I’m sure this was a dazzling display to see from the safety of the lobby, it was a shitstorm to be stuck inside—a million adorable airplanes swirling and loop-de-looping their pointy little noses right into my face. After pulling one too many out of my hair, which was whipped into a beehive at this point, I decided my safest option was to hunker down as close to the mattress as possible, in the no-fly zone.
I Am a Slash
People often feel compelled to offer their unsolicited opinions about Los Angeles. One time, at a cocktail party with my mom on the East Coast, a woman in her early forties said, “Oh I hate LA,” with the kind of disdain that is typically reserved for a colonoscopy. This is where I live. Where I chose to live. This is my home. If someone tells me they’ve taken up residence in even some of my least favorite cities—New Haven, Connecticut, for example—I’ll search for something redeeming to say, like, “Amazing pizza. You’ve got to go to Peppy’s.”
Before I moved, the Southern California commentary was relentless. “The smog is awful,” was a common thread. “Aren’t the people very fake?” was another, typically from women. The most common criticism was, of course, about the traffic, typically from someone who had never been to LA. The critic’s closing remarks were normally along the lines of, “Why are you moving there again?”
Soon after I moved, I realized that people who live in LA loved talking about traffic, too. It’s like Midwesterners and weather, or Southerners and humidity.
“It was an absolute goddamned nightmare getting down Olympic this afternoon,” Melissa would say, grabbing desperately for a happy hour menu.
“Sunset was jammed all the way to the 405,” Rachel would add, sucking a glass of half-priced sangria through a straw.
The Saturday Night Live skit “The Californians” is not hyperbole. The freeways all take a “the” before their number. I once instructed a friend who had recently moved here, “Just take The 10 to The 110 to The 101 North,” with no sense of irony at all. She thought I was quoting SNL. In actuality, I was just trying to get her back to Silverlake.
The bad traffic, I would learn, was one of those LA stereotypes that would prove to be true. Like the freeways being much less congested on Jewish holidays, it was just fact. And there was traffic at all hours of the day; the roads could be just as busy at one o’clock on a Wednesday as five o’clock on a Friday or noon on a Saturday. There was no method to the madness. After a few weeks of enduring traffic jams that looked like a scene from the “Everybody Hurts” music video (and contemplating getting out of the car and walking, or lying down in the carpool lane), it occurred to me that traffic patterns didn’t follow the conventional formula in LA because no one, as far as I could tell, had a job.
In this city that centered around the entertainment industry, everyone buzzed in a million different directions, like panicked planets orbiting the sun. It was agents going to meetings, casting directors getting to callbacks, producers trying to make it to set by six. And those were just the people with full-time jobs. A bizarrely disproportionate percentage of the population seemed to be composed of freelance somethings: freelance producers, freelance set designers, freelance makeup artists, and so on and so forth. Many people seemed to be many things all at once. A line from Lonesome Jim came to mind while I was sitting in traffic: “I’m a writer. And a dog walker. And I work part-time at an Applebee’s.” I remember thinking, What is wrong with these people?
Yet, after two years, I quit my proper full-time job at the talent agency because I wanted to write. I scoured the editorial landscape in LA and took an internship at Flaunt, an independent arts and fashion magazine. I called my dad and told him my plan. I was going to intern during the day—get contacts, experience, clips—and work at a restaurant at night to pay my rent.
“Have you run the numbers?” he asked, sounding none too thrilled. I looked down at the notepad where I had scribbled a list of my monthly expenses: rent, utilities, car insurance, food.
“It will work,” I said, even though I knew damn well it wouldn’t. In fact, while interning at the magazine, I accrued an impressive (horrifying) amount of debt on a now-closed credit card.
Even so, I loved it at Flaunt. In addition to housing a stable of extraordinarily talented writers, photographers, and designers, the magazine was known for throwing some of the most legendary parties in LA. The editor-in-chief was a fiery, five-foot-five Venezuelan man named Luis. His husband, Jim, was the art director. With a tanning-booth tan and black lacquered hair, Luis looked like he was made of wax. If the devil wore Prada at Runway, then the devil wore John Varvatos jeans and Chrome Hearts jewelry at Flaunt. Except that he was far from the devil, more like your favorite flamboyant uncle. He was hilarious and generous and kind, if not a little bit insane.
Everyone was a little bit insane there—it was just the sort of chaos I had been craving. Dogs darted down the hallways, an unnamed cat lived in an upstairs closet, and everyone smoked cigarettes out of their office windows. Forget a scale in the kitchen or spare bikinis in the bathroom, more often than not, there was no toilet paper to be found. During my interview, the guy asking me questions was wearing high-top Converse and a pair of long johns under a pair of shorts. His wiry hair was pulled into an unkempt bun, and he would later show me, with pride, the “booger wall” next to his desk. The offices were smack in the center of Hollywood, on a traffic-choked street just south of Sunset Boulevard. I finally knew what Phyllis Diller meant when she said, “Living in Hollywood is like living in a lit cigarette butt.” But that, too, only
added to the office’s filthy, fabulous, fraternal appeal.
Yet after a year, I told them it was time for me to quit. I don’t know why I left. I probably should have stayed and asked them to give me a full-time position. Afterward, they told me they would have; all I had to do was ask. So taken by the free-flowing lifestyles of all the freelancers that surrounded me, I think I was scared of something so full-time. Thus, I made up my mind: I was going out on my own to become a freelance writer. In my deluded, twenty-four-year-old mind, I thought I could make a living doing this.
Before I knew it, I had become one of those people who populated the freeway at midday; who thought it was just as normal to throw a birthday party on a Wednesday as it was on a Saturday; one of those work-from-homers who took up all the treadmills at the gym at two o’clock and were always talking about what project they were working on, though there were probably no projects at all.
One day, soon after taking that terrifying, paycheck-less leap, a girlfriend called on her lunch break. She worked in finance in San Francisco. I raced to pick up before the last ring and said breathlessly, wrapped in a towel, “Hi, so sorry, I just got out of the shower.”
“What do you mean you just got out of the shower?”
“What do you mean what do I mean I just got out of the shower?”
“It’s two o’clock on a Tuesday.”
And that’s when it hit me: I was, officially, unapologetically, one of them.
Little did I know my timing for this transition could not have been worse. Within months, the bottom dropped out of not only the publishing industry, but the entire economy. Everyone in magazines was terrified of the Internet. “It’s the end of print,” they’d say. Many publications shuttered, and those that didn’t desperately strained to keep their pages above water. Magazines that used to pay me a dollar a word dropped that to ten cents, or in some cases, to nothing. During this period, I got an assignment from a small but reputable arts magazine to write a 500-word piece about a young, up-and-coming director. I emailed the editor-in-chief to ask how much they were going to pay me. He responded: $50. I wrote back, “Fifty dollars, how about a hundred?” He replied, almost immediately, “No!!” There were really two exclamation points.
The glamour of this bohemian, work-from-home lifestyle quickly lost its luster when I completely ran out of money. Suddenly, my salon-purchased shampoos were replaced by bottles that said “Compare to.” I started washing my car—not just the windshield, but the entire vehicle—with a squeegee at the gas station. This, because I couldn’t afford a car wash. Car washes are nine dollars.
When I’d tell someone I was a writer in LA, more often than not they’d want to know about my screenplay. When I’d reply, “No, actually, I write for magazines,” they’d say, “Oh! Like movie reviews?” (This was part of an actual conversation, though the woman who said this also asked who “does” my eyelashes. Um, I do.) I realized the only way to stay afloat as a writer in LA at the height of the recession was to supplement that job with, oh, about a million others.
That’s when I turned into a full-blown “slash”: a writer/editor/actress/model/waitress/etc. I was a living, breathing, beverage-slinging, audition-going, electricity-being-cut-off, LA cliché. My slashiness was indiscriminating and far-reaching. I was a cocktail waitress, a leg model, a tray-passer at parties. I was an extra in a Smirnoff Ice commercial. I was a dead person in a music video. One time, the right side of my face was on an episode of Entourage. In one particularly misguided moment of weakness, I volunteered to be a “hair model” and had all of my long blonde hair chopped off for $250 and a couple of bottles of deep conditioner. And, I became a Box Girl.
When I told my parents about the box, they were, understandably, a little confused. “You’re going to do what? Where? Huh?” My liberal-minded mom was more accepting of the idea as she is very into contemporary art. My dad, on the other hand, has a hard time comprehending any job that doesn’t involve stock options and a 401K. He is a man who reads Forbes and watches CNBC from market open to market close. He once suggested I sue “those bastards” at The University of Colorado for giving me a degree in something that can’t make me any money. Then he added that he used to make more money while going to the bathroom than I had made in the last year. To this day, he still doesn’t know what the Box Girl “uniform” entailed. I think I told him “white pajamas.”
My dad believes you go to college and get a job. “A real one.” He doesn’t understand how his daughter could be carrying a $900 Bottega Veneta bag (my mom’s old one) while declining a side of guacamole at Chipotle because it was an additional two dollars. “Champagne taste on a beer budget,” he liked to say.
And yes, my parents could have supported me. But I didn’t want them to. That’s not to say there wasn’t a significant safety net; my dad bailed me out of many a financial clusterfuck over the years. But for the most part, I tried my pitiful best to get by on my own. My parents paid for my college education, in full. The least I could do was go out and make stupid decisions all on my own.
Run Lilibet Run
About a year after I left the modeling agency, my direct boss, Pam, suggested I go on commercial auditions. Actually, I am not entirely sure this is true. I think I might have suggested that I go on commercial auditions. It’s just so much less embarrassing to say it was her idea. They weren’t going to send me down the runway at Chanel, but perhaps on the occasional audition for a Colgate commercial. At the time, I was interning at one magazine, freelancing for others, and cock-tailing at a restaurant. I thought booking the occasional commercial would be a great way to bring in some extra money. Little did I know that “booking the occasional commercial” is about as easy as “buying the winning Powerball ticket at your local 7-Eleven.” But by sneaking in the back door, I became a commercial actress, and the assistant who replaced me had to leave me messages spelling out five-digit street addresses for casting facilities in Burbank. I did, however, schedule my own bikini waxes.
The only commercials I ever actually booked were for running- or fitness-related ads, and that’s because with all this newfound freelancer time on my hands, I was running many miles most days. That, and the fact that the other actresses interpreted “Come to the audition in running attire” to mean, “Show up smelling like cigarettes in yoga pants and flip-flops.” The art director for an Asics campaign said he knew he was going to book me as soon as I got out of my car.
“You had on running shoes,” he said. “And your hair was in a ponytail.”
The bar was set pretty low.
My success in the commercial realm has been modest at best, mortifying at worst. While I have made a fool out of myself in front of very good-looking strangers at more than one audition, one such experience will forever hold the title of Most Embarrassing Audition Ever.
A friend of mine was producing an Old Navy commercial, so she asked me to come straight to the “callbacks.” Meaning, I jumped over a hundred girls and got to audition with only a handful of finalists. Because fitness commercials were the only ones I had ever come remotely close to booking, I assumed this was a callback for Old Navy’s fitness line. Thus, I interpreted the wardrobe instructions of “short shorts and a tank top” to mean “running shorts and a running tank top.”
As soon as I walked into the casting facility, I knew something had gone horribly wrong. The other women were dressed in short denim cut-offs, heels, and slinky little tank tops. They were all models—real models—with long legs and thick, flowing hair, which had been curled into perfect ripples that spilled over their shoulders. They turned to look when I arrived. I stood at the entrance, my thin hair strung into a ponytail, my chest flattened into a sports bra, wearing shorts with built-in underwear. Standing there, I wondered if they’d notice if I just started walking backward out the door.
Immediately, my producer-friend spotted me, and I was stuck. “No, you look great,” she said when I questioned my attire. “I live five minutes away,” I said.
“I can go change.” She insisted that I looked perfect in what I had on. She was trying to be sweet. I really wish she hadn’t been.
As I filled out my information in the waiting room, I plotted my attack: When I go into the audition room, I’ll make some joke about my outfit. I’ll make them laugh. It will all be fine. Moments later, a casting assistant came out and said the creative team was ready for us. Us? We had to all go in together? I should have just sprinted out the door. I was wearing running shoes. My friend grabbed my arm and said, “Let’s go, hot stuff.” At this point I was fairly certain she was just messing with me.
Twelve of us marched in—them, statuesque in their stilettos, me, squatty in my tennis shoes—and took our positions, side-by-side, along a line of masking tape stuck to the floor. These women were standing in the most stunning positions, arrangements I would have never even thought of: chin up, shoulders back, chest forward, one sinewy arm resting gingerly on right hip, pelvis thrust forward, left foot pointed ever so slightly to the southwest. I looked to my right, then to my left: They were all doing it, in lock step, as if preparing to bring their knees to their chests in a Rockettes-style cancan.
I shifted my weight in my extra-stability running shoes and put my hands on my hips. Wait, that’s too many hands, I thought. I look like a cheerleading coach. Only one hand. I dropped one arm and raised my shoulders to my ears. (“Don’t wear your shoulders like earrings,” I could hear my mom saying.) Shit. I tipped my nose toward the ceiling and looked out of the corners of my eyes to make sure I was doing it right. I wasn’t. I looked like an asshole.
Box Girl Page 6