The Beverly Hills Era

The Beverly Hills Era

                I returned from New York on Sunday October 7, 2007, picked up my car from remote parking, paid $80, or $90, or $100, whatever it was, and drove to Beverly Hills, getting a tad bit lost on the way, but not egregiously so.  Joel was there when I called, and he let me into his underground parking space.  I unpacked all of my stuff.  He offered to help but I said I was fine.  After everything was in my room, I went downstairs and sat with Joel and his friends for a while.  They had bought Coronas and only had lemons so we were using those.  I had one or two.  One of his friends, Sharon (pronounced Cha-rone, a guy) worked in music education with UCLA I believe, and they were watching clips of bands on YouTube on a laptop screen.  They were talking about Journey, I believe, and their new Filipino singer.  I mentioned that I had just been at the LCD Soundsystem concert last night in New York and that their video for the song “All My Friends” was very cool.  They found that on YouTube and we watched it.  They mostly appreciated it—I remember Sharon getting into it.  They asked what the song was about and I said, “It’s about starting out your life, with the first five years trying to get ahead, make your own way in the world, until you realize that you just want to be with your friends, and how your priorities shift.”  After they played a video of David Bowie that was very cool and I told them I was going to get to setting up my room.

I probably turned on my computer and tried to set up the internet, and I probably took out the Ghost and smoked a bowl.  I still had a good eighth or quarter left from the ounce I had bought in New York many weeks prior. 

                Truth be told by time in Beverly Hills was rather empty.  I spent the month (3 weeks) looking for a job.  I went to two concerts—Morrissey at the Hollywood Palladium, and Sunset Rubdown at the El Rey Theater.  Both were excellent and it is arguable how much they require delving into.  When I parked in the lot at the Hollywood Palladium for $15 or so, I ran over a beer bottle, heard the explosion of glass under my tire, and feared the worst.  The next day I took my car into a nearby auto repair shop and they told me I would need a new tire.  I took care of that as well.

                At a certain point I ran out of my weed and I started frantically trying to figure out how to get a prescription.  This may have been covered in a previous section, but the wait was quite interminable at the time, and I tried to pick up through alternative means through a dealer that Sycamore had contacted previously.  I waited at Venice Beach for them to return the call and they never did.  A couple days later I got sick and bought a bottle of Robitussin.  I had also been in the habit of renting movies from Blockbuster.  I even went so far as to rent Hitch, a movie I normally do not think I would actively seek out, but such was the selection and such was my need for entertainment at the time.  Transformers came out around that time on DVD and I remember drinking a little more cough medicine than necessary that evening while watching that film and doing my laundry.  The interesting thing about this evening is that there were very heavy winds and loud noises happening outside.  I was watching a movie about giant robots stomping around the greater Los Angeles region.  I may have been praying that the world had truly been overrun by robots and that society would change as a result.  The next day there were reports of many fires that had broken out due to the inordinately heavy winds that night.  Thus, the Malibu fires of October 2007.

                A couple days after me, another roommate named Mike moved in temporarily for the month.  He was about my age, from Park Slope in Brooklyn.  He was there on a special film assignment.  Joel had three spots in the underground garage and he mostly stayed in the back one, which did not require tandem maneuvers, and Mike and I would always be knocking on each other’s doors to ask the other if they could move their car.  We got along quite well and I told Mike about my travails in attempting to obtain a prescription for pot.  Near the end of his stay he went on a cruise with the cast and crew of the show he was working on, some sort of weight loss show for Bravo.  I told him it sounded exciting and he told me it sounded great in theory but really was not that ideal.  Still, I wish someone would call me to work on a cruise for a television show.

Before Mike had moved in, Mark was making preparations to leave for Switzerland and on his last day back he asked me to take a walk with him.  We went down to the T-Mobile store and he talked to the guys about international calling plans.  Then we went to the nail salon next door (this was at the strip mall at the corner of Palm and Olympic) and he tried to negotiate a foot massage for $25.  It was very funny to watch him try and get his way only to be met with resistance from the ladies working there.  Eventually he got a foot massage elsewhere. 

                Joel would often invite me downstairs for dinner and though he was not the most ambitious chef in the world, the food was always fine for my needs.  He would introduce me to aspects of Kosher Jewish culture, like the special way to wash your hands before the meal.  Once he invited me down for a special Shabbos dinner, after Mark had returned from Switzerland.  There was whiskey at this meal and Mark kept imploring me to do more and more shots with him.  It quickly became hilarious as I lost my inhibitions and the table started making some rather filthy jokes and they told me they were being very bad for a religious dinner, but that this is what it was all about.  We were having a great time and by the end Mark was asking me about my first novel and offering me suggestions to the different plot directions I could have taken it and I found his comments highly entertaining, as there was nothing to hint at his enthusiasm before.

                Eventually I did get my prescription, and after picking up my second eighth from Farmacy, found my first job.  I had been mailing off resumes to dozens of places, and I had received a very confident call from a guy named Shezad from Accountemps who told me I should come in for an interview the next day.  I had been in the habit of smoking up every morning and felt that it did not impede my interview skills.  I was quite stoned when I went into the office there and Shezad was very friendly and had me take the tests, which I did well enough on, and he told me he could set me up at a great place called Jefferies & Co. and that the work was nothing I couldn’t handle.  This was great news that I had finally gotten a job.  For a while it had been getting me down.  I remember once telling Mark that I was twenty-four and couldn’t find a job and then he said, “Well, I’m almost 40 and I’m still looking for a job, so take heart.”

                I don’t even want to get into the whole Star Staffing Agency thing but I suppose I should since I always tell people that I moved to Los Angeles to try and work in the entertainment industry.  Since I was very young it was the only kind of work that interested me.  My older brother, who had lived in L.A., had told me I should try to find work as a P.A.  I did that, and found little success, though I was actually offered one opportunity which I turned down as it would only pay $400 a week.  I thought that wasn’t enough.  Maybe that was a mistake.  I also remember applying to be in an experimental film called “Rubber Ducky” which would cast two young males who are returning to one of their homes after school and who keep pushing each other to greater extremes—the film would require nudity—and I e-mailed the director asking him if this was basically just a porn film and I asked him if he had a script I could look at and he wrote back saying, “These kinds of things work without scripts at the start all the time, it’s totally normal.  I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m not looking for a debate, so thank you and good luck.” Then I remember driving to the 20^th Century Fox Studios and asking the attendant if there were any job postings inside on a bulletin board that I could look at and he told me to go to foxcareers.com and look there and he opened the gate for me and I drove around looking for an exit.  I remember a very cool huge picture of Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker engaged in a lightsaber battle on one of the buildings.  I realized there was a golf cart following me, and I found an exit, and I asked the attendant there if I could exit there and he said something into his walkie-talkie and then said, “Oh, you’re the one they were talking about, yeah, you can exit here.”

                But the closest I came to getting a job in the entertainment industry was through Star Staffing Agency.  I met with a lady named Louise—this was the second or third interview I went on in L.A. period—and she called me in and told me ways to change my resume, and some of them were helpful.  I think mine had actually gone to two pages and she told me to keep it to a single sheet.  She told me that the studios they recruited for did not direct hire at all anymore because some of the executives were such acidic individuals that employees would be heaving lawsuits at them left and right so that now they only took on temps.  I said it was okay—I had dealt with tough bosses before—and I was sure there was nothing I could handle.  I left the interview, e-mailed Louise my revised resume, and felt like I had met a motherly figure who was going to take care of me.  A couple days later she called and told me she might have a position for me—at CBS Paramount, working as a “Runner” for $15 an hour.  That got me really excited.  “Yes, yes,” I told her, “I would so love to do that.” She told me she would call back in fifteen minutes and I waited for that call on pins and needles—for an hour.  Finally she called me back and said that they had decided to take on somebody who had temped for them previously and had just become available.  And I don’t exactly remember when she talked to me for the last time, but it may have been that same phone call, when she actually told me she had been trying to contact me the day previous for a similarly exciting job at a studio and had told me that she couldn’t get in contact with me because she couldn’t read my handwriting on the application—she couldn’t read the area code of my phone number, which was 847.  I said, “It’s 847, I wouldn’t mess up my own area code!” and she said, “It was a nine, honey.” For many years now I have been in the habit of making a slash in my seven, thus, the misreading.  Never mind that she was talking on the phone to me then. 

                So it did not take much to crush my dream of Hollywood stardom.  By the end of the month, it was either going to be get a job, or go home, and I took what was offered to me, and I started looking for a new sublet, a more stable place to live that would not be as expensive.  I found Brett. 

                I had posted an ad on craigslist for housing wanted and he had replied to me, and everything sounded too good to be true—a 2 bedroom 2 bathroom apartment in  Palms, and a $750 a month price to include everything.  I went to look at the place and the apartment carried a strange odor and I thought Brett was probably a stoner, which immediately made me feel at peace.  Also, his screen name had been rastaman something, so that was a good sign as well.  I met him and he was very friendly and he seemed to like me well enough and he said he thought it would work out well and I decided that it would be a great place to move in on November 1^st.  The room had a queen-size bed, a TV with DirecTV, a writing desk, a much bigger closet that would fit everything in my car, and my own bathroom. 

                After I had secured my new job and new housing, I was smoking one night (I had smoked many mornings, days, and nights there) and watching a DVD on my laptop and I heard Joel say from the hallway, “Are you smoking marijuana in there?” And I got up, opened the door, looked at him with a nervous smile and said, “Yes, I’m sorry, is that a problem?” And he said, “Oh, no man, enjoy yourself.” I could tell he just wanted to placate me and I felt a bit bad about it.  The next day I had done it again, and Mark came in asking if he could buy some off of me.  I sold him a gram.  Then afterwards, he told me that it did stink up the hallway, though they had never said anything before, and he asked if I could take my bong and smoke outside on their little concrete patio.  I did that, and felt very sheepish because there were little kids on the other side and I felt a bit awkward trying to quickly smoke a bowl without my usual accompaniment of music and pensive contemplation.  I came back and told him that it was a bit scary because I was afraid the kids would see me and say, “What’s that he’s doing?” to their babysitters or parents, and Mark said, “Well, you’ve got a prescription for it.  Who cares?”

                My first day at Jefferies was October 29, and I would work there for six more months.  Everybody was very friendly the first day and I had a partner named Jeremiah who had dressed up as if he were going to an interview for my first day and everybody kept complimenting him on his style.  I didn’t quite know what to think of it over my first few days, but I had found my first serious home in L.A. in that company, and its office would end up being the site of some of my fondest memories. 

                On Halloween I went to Venice Beach and partied with Sycamore and Molly.  They were going at the Morton Salt lady and another salt mascot, who was apparently an Indian Chief.  I wasn’t going as anything and I asked Molly if she could put makeup on me to make me look like a zombie or something.  I ended up going as a cross between a zombie and Alex from A Clockwork Orange.  We went to a couple bars and I remember it being a great night and having had too much to drink, but still driving safely enough to get back home on my final night in Beverly Hills.  I was nervous about moving the next day but I was soon to find my best situation in L.A. yet.