I look at the cashier. She nods.
Ray and Dottie are fucking geniuses. What better way to win over a city of rejects and desperados than by creating a business where the last thing they do before they take your money and send you away is give you love.
My tour continues and I pass the dilapidated bookstore where I’ll be working. A sign in the window reads BACK IN FIVE OR TEN and I continue toward the UCB theater. It’s smaller than I expected, like a storefront. Posters cover the glass begging for my attention and a chubby girl holding a clipboard asks me if I want a ticket.
“Yeah,” I say, improvising. “Does the beginner class have a show soon?”
“Which class?” she asks. Someone inside pounds on the window and she waves her clipboard. “Did you want a ticket for the Master Blasters at five?”
No I do not want that. She burrows back into the building and I keep walking. I’m almost home, near the corner of Franklin and Tamarind and walking here is uncomfortable, not like strolling in New York. I take out my phone and check Facebook and fuck it all because someone’s commented about Off-the-Grid Amy dropping out of her UCB class. My head pounds, the heat, the news. Fuck.
And then it’s that phenomenon, where you’re thinking about someone and they suddenly appear. Because right there, in the window of Birds Rotisserie Chicken Café & Bar, is a photo of Amy. It’s a surveillance shot, grainy black and white, but it’s her, down to the long blond hair and STANFORD SWIMMING T-shirt. Beneath the photo are the words: Window of Shame.
I go into Birds. I sidle up to the bar. When the hot bartender chick asks what I want I tell her to surprise me. I smile. This woman has to want me. That’s how I will get her to tell me about Amy.
She winks. “I hope you like pineapples.”
I fucking hate pineapples. “Love ’em,” I say. “Bring it.”
Her tits are hard, fake, harsh like her, strapped against her chest by her black tank top. Her name is Deana and she is what happens when the hot girl in the Guns N’ Roses video grows up. It’s real now and she tells me how Amy made it onto the Window of Shame.
“She started coming in a couple weeks ago,” she says. “She was a pain in the ass from day one, asking for blueberry vodka and sending back drinks claiming they were weak or not what she wanted. Totally shady. Like, bitch, I saw you water it down. Then she just walked out, didn’t pay her bill.”
“The worst,” I say. “Did you call the police?”
Deana stops shaking my drink and looks at an old guy with slick red hair. They laugh in an inside joke sort of way. “Did we call the police?” she repeats.
“How many minutes ago exactly did you move here?” the man asks.
“Earlier today,” I say. Deana gets excited and rings a bell and grabs a megaphone and I get a free shot of Patrón.
The man introduces himself to me. His name is Akim, and Deana says they didn’t call the cops because this is Hollywood. She shrugs. “They have better things to do than chase down girls who run out on checks.”
Deana says that Amy is allowed at La Poubelle because it’s different there. “Guys buy drinks for chicks like that, model types.” She doesn’t mask her disgust. “Personally, I don’t go anywhere where I can’t pay for my own booze. Self-respect.”
I stay at Birds for hours, drinking that pineapple shit, making things right with Deana, laughing at her jokes, letting her be the one to tell me that she doesn’t date customers. I leave a fat tip and bring my groceries home and change and rush over to La Poubelle, the place where Amy should be. It’s a long dark bar, like the hull of a Parisian pirate ship. I sit in the back corner. I stay until two, waiting for Amy to get there. I buy some Xanax off Dez. I’m sure that I’ll find Amy within twenty-four hours, forty-eight at the most. She doesn’t have class. She’ll be here. She will.
10
BUT she wasn’t there. She didn’t go to La Pou that night, or any night. And now it’s been a month and I’ve tried everything—hiking, Craigslist, breaking into Harvey’s occupant database, even Pilates—but I still can’t fucking find Amy. All I have to show for it is a farmer’s tan and a bunch of new muted button-down shirts that I never would have bought in New York. My brain hates me for all the stupid casting calls I’ve posted. None of it works. I stay optimistic. I listen to “Patience” by Guns N’ Roses and I think of hunters and explorers who spent countless nights in the wild, unsure of where they were, or if they would find what they were looking for. But LA is fucking monotonous and it’s wearing on me, the way I keep not finding her. And when I try to talk to people, everyone says the same thing: Tinder!
Fuck them. Amy’s not on Tinder. She’s too smart. Too phony. Too old-fashioned. We are the same. I get so mad that I can’t sleep and Dez laughs—you do like your downers—and I collect Percocets, just in case I need to drug her.
I hate it here. Everyone is wrong. Delilah is bad at flirting. Harvey is too aggressive about drinking. And every day is actually three days, a freezing morning, a blistering day, and a cool night. You need a lot of clothes. And every day is the same day, which is why it’s important to hang a calendar. I see why people move here and wake up one day scratching their heads, wondering when they turned forty or what year it is.
It’s claustrophobic and I have no car and I hate Amy for not being on Facebook, for not having an e-mail I could hack. I live almost exclusively in this one giant square of earth bound by Tamarind Avenue on the west and Canyon Drive on the east. In New York, you can walk for hours and go unnoticed and you can follow a woman for several blocks without her knowing. But the cliché is real and people don’t walk here unless it’s to improve their precious fucking bodies or to reach another form of transportation, a car, a bus, a Lyft. They put on sneakers and carry silver canteens around and what I would do to just have one hour on Seventh Avenue in the middle of the night. I miss being invisible. I think I might be getting fat too.
Every day some awful noise wakes me up, Stevie from the Pantry accidentally texting me instead of his girlfriend, Harvey practicing with his ukulele, or people showing up to shoot piece of shit shorts in the building. I am not a snob, but the average person here is just, well . . . it’s not New York. I stare at my popcorn ceiling and think about my beautiful old apartment. I check up on Pearl & Noah & Harry & Liam; I live vicariously through them now. Sometimes I think about friending them and confessing everything. Maybe Amy mixed up and told one of the girls something that would help me find her. But she’s a professional. She knew what she was doing.
AT the beginning of July I sign a rent check and hand it over to Harvey.
“Don’t look glum,” he says. “They say it takes about ten years to settle in here. You gotta stay positive. Am I right or am I right?”
I give him the thumbs-up he wants so badly and he claps and I flee and I’m so sick of the stupidity of it all, Harvey and his big fucking smile, my boss Calvin, who is a whole other kind of annoying.
It’s nothing like Mooney Books and Calvin is one of those people who is better on Facebook than he is in real life. He would be wiser to evaporate and live exclusively online with his telegenic swath of thick, dark hair. I want to wipe it the fuck off his forehead and take his stupid oversized eyeglasses too. I feel that way a lot here, like I want to tear people’s clothes off their bodies in a nonsexual way, shave their heads, line them all up for Silkwood showers. Calvin keeps all his passwords on a piece of paper in his wallet, fucking moron, and there’s always a movie playing in the bookstore, as if this is a video rental store in the ’90s. Today it’s True Romance so that Calvin can tell me for the fiftieth time that they shot part of it up the street on Beachwood.
“Sup, Joe-Bro?”
“Sup, Calvin.”
Something is always up with Calvin and he launches into a story about his manager that sounds made up. In the past month I’ve learned that there are many Calvins, dependent on which drugs he’s on. There is Cocaine Calvin, amping up for a Better Call Saul audition. There is Marijua
na Calvin, chill and watching Tarantino and dreaming of being in a Tarantino movie and laughing out loud at jokes that are meant to make you smile. There is Reject Actor Calvin, gut protruding through a tight purple T-shirt, glasses on, reeking of hair products, telling me to be quiet because he’s visualizing.
Some days, Calvin is a writer. He puts his hair in a ponytail. He works on something called Ghost Food Truck. Some days it’s a self-aware campy teen horror flick about a haunted food truck. Some days it’s a pitch for IFC about a food truck that is run by ghosts. Offbeat, he likes to say, as if this somehow means a TV show doesn’t need a story. Still other days GFT is a pilot script—possible HBO or FX but never network—about a serial killer who roams the country killing people and making burritos out of them. The thing is, Ghost Food Truck is like Calvin and like everyone here, so flipping flimsy. It changes depending on what he watched last night. On what his friends watched.
At least today I’m dealing with the good kind of Cocaine Calvin. He’s dancing and pounding his chest and telling me about True Romance again and he’s best like this, getting hyped for an audition, wearing himself out like a toddler. He leaves to try and make it in Hollywood and I post another useless casting call on Craigslist—tall blond beautiful.
My listings are getting more uninspired as time goes by and every day that Amy doesn’t submit a headshot to one of my imaginary castings, I feel like a detective in one of those shows where they hit you over the head with the fact that a missing child becomes almost impossible to find when twenty-four hours pass. It could drive you nuts, searching for someone in LA, and that’s why people here are so miserable. It is fucking hard to find things. Fame. Love. Parking spots. Cheap gas. Good inexpensive headshots. An agent. A manager. A happy hour where the nachos don’t suck. A tall blond con artist named Amy.
It’s been a long month without rain, without clouds, without a sighting. And it sickens me to look back because I’ve done my part. I set my traps. I assembled my team. Calvin knows to text me the second anyone walks into this place with a copy of Portnoy’s Complaint and Amy should have been in by now. How does she pay for her fucking superfruits?
Harvey knows to tell me if any new girls show up, tall blondes in college shirts. Dez too. Deana from Birds quit, but I set better traps there, as well as at La Pou and all the places in between. I bought bottles of prenatal vitamins and told the bartenders that my estranged girlfriend is pregnant. I worked up some tears. The female bartenders at Birds said we’re all family in the Village and they couldn’t get over how sweet I am, carrying vitamins around. The guy behind the bar at La Poubelle was empathetic. He looked me in the eye and lifted the bag and promised me he’d be on the lookout. I had so much hope. So why the fuck haven’t I found her?
Calvin comes back all coked up, hooting and hollering and doing a stupid jig he does after he nailed it. He goes on Tinder.
“Jesus,” I say. “Didn’t you just hook up last night?”
He nods. “That’s not what I’m doing now. I’m working it, Joe Bro. Tinder is the most important casting database in the world,” he raves. “The place where every actor and actress is hanging out, like what the club used to be, or the drugstore soda fountain was in, like, the fifties.” He burps. “Fucking Tinder, dude. My buddy Leo, he got cast off Tinder last week.”
“But isn’t it just dating and shit?” I protest. I don’t want this to be true. I don’t want to join and I don’t want Amy to be on there Tindering around.
Calvin burps. “Swipe. Fuck. Book.”
I have no choice. I join. I swipe. And twenty-four hours later, I think my eyes are broken and my head is so full of faces that I worry the visual part of my brain might run out of room. There are so many girls. And they’re all here. It’s an infinite database and when girls on Tinder wander into my five-mile radius, I can see them in my phone. Now Tinder is taking over my brain and every time I swipe, I picture Amy in a USC shirt, yawning and strolling out of my radius and I can’t stop swiping because I have to find her. I don’t sleep at all for two fucking days.
It’s the most pathetic move yet and I think California is getting to me. I call Mr. Mooney. He has no patience. “I told you,” he snaps. “Get your goddamn dick sucked.”
So I try. I meet a girl named Gwen on Tinder and it’s like ordering Chinese food. In the pictures, Gwen is shiny and rested, glistening like pork-fried rice. Gwen shows up and she isn’t as shiny in person, same way the pork-fried rice is always greasier than you want it to be. Her skin is puffy. She is pale. She is proof that they can’t all be California girls and she tells me about her acting class and her last bad Tinder date. She drinks red wine and looks at herself in the mirror. Her teeth stain. She sneezes. I say God bless you. I drink vodka and search the bar for Amy. It’s different being here with a woman instead of Calvin. I’m staring at people and Gwen notices. “I was the same way my first month,” she says. “Everyone’s just so much prettier here. Even the men.”
Naturally, while I’m at the bar with Gwen, I see the most attractive girl I’ve ever seen in my life. And I can’t put my finger on it. She is not classically beautiful by any means and she is hardly young. Her off-the-shoulder soft sweatshirt showcases the right amount of her boobs, like two scoops of ice cream, soft and creamy. Her hair is cotton candy. Her legs are caramel. When the bartender brings me the glass of water I asked for an hour ago, the candy girl and I reach for it at the same time.
“I’m so sorry,” she says.
“Take it,” I say.
She smiles. It would be a dick move to hit on her in front of Gwen and I am not a dick. This is why I agree to see Gwen’s new apartment. She lives in a guesthouse by a pool in Los Feliz. It’s depressing and small and there are pictures of Madonna everywhere. Gwen humps me and I close my eyes and picture the candy girl. We use each other. She sucks my dick.
I spend the night in Gwen’s guesthouse and this is where it’s true when the deluded aspiring actors say that the business is all about timing. The one fucking night I leave the Village and fall asleep in Los Feliz, I wake to three texts from Calvin:
Dude girl here with Portnoy Complaint
She’s being weird about money wants cash not direct deposit you want to buy it off her?
All good, she was in a rush so we worked it out got it 4 u
My hands are shaking and this guesthouse smells like soup and I am out of the squeaky bed and I am looking for my shoes and fuck. This is my fault. I lost my focus. I have to get out of here but I can’t find my fucking shoe and I look under the bed and it’s nothing but dildos and stilettos and acting manuals. Fuck my shoes. I don’t deserve them.
My Lyft is one minute away and I step out into the overbearing, in-your-face, moronic sun and I duck my head and here are my shoes, lined up next to Gwen’s, as if she wanted the people in the big house to know about this, about us.
I get into the Lyft and the driver wants to know if he should take Franklin or Fountain and he doesn’t have sunglasses and the AC is broken and he misspells the name of my street in his GPS. The phrase one-night stand is a misnomer. There is no such thing as a one-night stand. Sometimes, what you do for one night destroys your future.
11
IT’S not a book. It’s a screenplay. White, thin, single-sided pages bound by brass tacks. Calvin rubs his eyes. Stoned. Sucking on a kale smoothie. “Dude, you said Portnoy’s Complaint.”
I am livid. “The book.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Right thiggity there.”
“This is a screenplay,” I hiss. “Who collects screenplays?”
“JoeBro, don’t take this the wrong way, but you need to chill. Have you ever done a juice fast?” He hits a pack of American Spirits against the desk. “You get so intense. That gets your cortisol going. Cortisol is not cool.”
This is like getting pulled over for not using your blinker and I could kill Calvin. I could kill Amy. I could kill everyone and put them in a blender and make them into a smoothie. Fast Five is on t
he TV and I watch Dominic Toretto and RIP Brian O’Conner assemble a team. My team fucking sucks.
“JoeBro,” Calvin says. “You got Tinder banged and you look all miserable and shit.”
“I rushed over here for the book.”
“Well, like, the screenplay is about the book, so, like, it’s kind of the book, only in different form, like the way iced coffee is still coffee even though it’s cold.”
I can’t help it. “Fuck off, Calvin,” I snap.
“Dude,” he says. “You need to chill.”
Toretto never chills because you don’t get anywhere in this world by being chill and Calvin is going on about a Flaming Lips LP and food trucks and Big Bear and bacon, about how wasted he was last night. I wish I had Cocaine Calvin. Pothead Calvin is impossible, a no-talent Duplass brother, smug and slow. His buds are texting. They’re at some fucking market downtown and they can bring us lunch and Calvin still doesn’t get that I don’t drink vegetables or care about dope food trucks in K-Town. I care about books.
I tell him I’m not hungry and he says I need to laugh and he gives me his iPad and commands me to watch a killer Henderson video. I tell him I don’t want to watch the video but he says that I have to. “Henderson is on,” he says. “He goes off on his new girlfriend and this dope is gold. This gold is dope. Genius.”
Everyone here calls everything genius. “Calvin.”
“JoeBro, you need to chill,” he says. “Watch. Chill. Be.”
But how can I be chill when Delilah is texting, clinging, and Calvin is yammering about pitching Ghost Food Truck to Comedy Central or IFC. He might get weird with it and go to Adult Swim and he’s banging the vaporizer that never works against the counter and his ego swells and Ghost Food Truck would actually be mellower on HBO and maybe you could even put John Cusack in that truck and maybe he would pick up girls and disappear and look for the girls and never find them, because like, it’s a Ghost Food Truck and he’s a ghost and he doesn’t know it. I give in and tell Calvin it’s genius and he texts his writing partner Slade and I would bet my nuts that Calvin and Slade will never write Ghost Food Truck the cartoon, the movie, or the HBO series. People in LA talk about writing but they don’t actually do it. It’s the LA equivalent of going to the Cloisters or the Met in New York. You say you’re going to do it but at the end of the day it’s Saturday or it’s too hot or it’s too cold or you could just as easily watch TV.
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