Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) (9 page)

T
he
Esquire
party is held at the Beverly Hills mansion of NFL superstar Keyshawn Johnson. We valet Matt’s Hyundai, accept a couple of passed drinks, sip them by the pool, and gawk at the sweeping views and sweet C-and D-list celebrities we know so well from
The Real World
and
Road Rules
. (Randy from
American Idol
is there too.)

We wake up in the morning in the two-bedroom condo on the west side of town that we’re subletting for three months. The owner of the place is a working actor in his forties who is giving us a deal because he is most concerned about the well-being of his two cats, one of whom is eighteen years old and has a hard time with any activity involving moving or eating. We have no job leads and no place to report to.

I’m ready to start looking for a waitressing gig, but Matt’s friends encourage me to send my résumé to a particular temp agency that helped them get good assistant positions within the entertainment industry. But even after the multiple job interviews the agency has found me, no one has hired me. At the same time, the talent agent who was interested in Matt has stopped returning his calls. He resorts to sending his résumé
to the same temp agency. He also applies to every entry-level job within
the industry
he can find and sends his short films out to every contact he has and even ones he doesn’t.

But by early December, we’ve been here for two and a half months, and we’ve just about given up on finding jobs before the town shuts down for the holidays. (When celebrities go on vacation, everyone who works for them does too.) It’s set to be a bleak Christmas for us. We don’t have enough money to fly home, nor do we feel we can, since, uhm, we just got here.

And then I get a call from Julian, my white-haired temp-agency agent.

“I’ve got an assignment for you at CAA,” he says.

CAA stands for Creative Artists Agency, which is the best-known talent agency in the business. I’d been there the previous month for an interview for a second-assistant position—basically the assistant to the assistant—during which I doubt my jaw closed once. The place exuded money and success, from the valet parking for guests to the giant Lichtenstein in the lobby to the twenty-two-year-olds dressed in slim-fitting suits. “It’s a temporary position, but with the right attitude, it could lead to more.”

“Sounds great.”

“Now, can you gift-wrap?”

“Sure!”

I start the next morning.

That night, Matt and I are still in unemployed mode, and so when we get a craving for ice cream at eleven-thirty p.m., we walk to the nearby Vons grocery store to pick up a pint of cookies and cream as we have done on so many other nights. Only, this night, I’m wound up. I’m running and jumping
onto Matt’s back for a piggyback ride. To make it extra fun, he is dodging my jumps. After one such jump, I am rebounded off his body, and my foot hits the pavement at a weird angle. I stand up and know something’s wrong, but Matt thinks I can walk it off, and I try. I make it to the frozen-foods section before sitting down on the cold grocery store floor and taking off my shoe and sock to see what I’ve done.

The side of my foot has swelled up into into an odd-looking mound. I instantly start crying. It’s broken. I’m positive.

But I call my mom anyway to see if she agrees with my diagnosis. It’s almost three a.m. on the East Coast. She picks up the phone, half-asleep.

“I just broke my foot,” I tell her.

But once she wakes up a bit more and gets the whole story, she isn’t so sure.

“There are so many bones in the foot, Ame. Why don’t you go home and sleep on it and see what it looks like in the morning.”

But the mound is growing by the minute. Plus, in high school, my brother famously walked on a broken foot that both of my doctor parents said wasn’t broken for a solid week before finally taking him to get X-rays and confirming that yes, in fact it
was
.

“No, Mom. I wanna go to the ER.”

She sighs. “Fine.” And then right before I hang up, “Thank God I got you health insurance!”

Matt and I go to a nearby emergency room, get X-rays, and return home at three in the morning with an officially diagnosed broken foot, a pair of crutches, a prescription for Vicodin, and the name of an orthopedist who can put a cast on it tomorrow.

Hanging on the walls in the guestroom of our subletted condo are posters from many of the Broadway shows the owner has been in—it appears he had a good run as the lead in
The King and I
. When he gave us his keys, the three of us chatted for a while, getting to know one another a bit. He told us about his most successful role to date: a scene he shared with Viggo Mortensen in the Disney movie
Hidalgo
. He seemed so proud, and rightly so.

And one day, a week or two into our stay there, when we had sent our résumés out to a couple of places and had nothing to do the rest of the day, we put his copy of
Hidalgo
into the DVD player. Neither of us had seen it before, so we turned the lights down, made some popcorn, and allowed ourselves to be entertained. And we were. It was exciting, too, when we saw someone we knew from real life on our television screen. But the scene was so short, maybe two minutes long. And I remember thinking that what you really remember from the scene and from the movie on the whole is the ruggedly handsome Viggo Mortensen. Mortensen was the star of the show. But more important, what I remember thinking was: Matt and I are going to do better than this nice man and his two-minute spot in a Disney movie. Sure, he’s done well for himself. He owns a condo in California with a little back patio and a community pool. But Matt and I are headed for bigger things, and more quickly too.

The following morning, Matt drives me to CAA. My crutches are in the backseat and my throbbing foot is in a Velcro and
plastic boot they’d issued me last night in the ER. We make it halfway there before I flip down the visor and look at myself in the mirror. I’d hardly slept and hadn’t showered.

“I can’t go to work like this,” I say to Matt.

I call in to Julian and tell him about my foot. He understands, sort of.

At this point in my life, I am just beginning to experience the straightforward kind of stress that comes with needing to make rent and pay for car insurance. As for health insurance, my mom was right. Thank God she’d signed me up for a plan on my behalf. (If she hadn’t, I’m sure I would still be paying for that emergency-room trip.)

By my third month in Los Angeles, my Aladdin’s Eatery savings are running low. More than that, I’m worried I don’t have what it takes to make it in this city. Compared to Matt’s friends and all of those assistants who had interviewed me that month, I feel so timid and breakable, my foot just another reminder of how fragile I am.

Since I’m not at work after all, I can get my cast on in the afternoon. I choose bright yellow for the color and am surprised to learn that though the bone I’ve broken is on the right side of my foot, the cast goes from my toes almost to my knee. But once it’s on, I feel so much better. I feel protected. I call Julian and tell him I’m all casted up and can go in to CAA the next day if they still need me.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I say. “Absolutely.”

For the next two days, I wrap elaborate holiday gifts from
the talent agency to their various actor and director clients. In the afternoon, I stuff envelopes. But they’re not just any envelopes. They are residual checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and some of them are going to people whose names I’m extremely familiar with. It seems crazy to me that they’ll let just anyone do this. But then, someone has to do it, right?

It’s the end of 2004, before every cell phone is also a camera, so Matt and I have a bunch of actual Kodak-printed photos from this era, many of which involve me happily posing in a way that best highlights my bright-yellow cast, which Matt signed at the very top in thick capital letters and an exclamation point:
MATT!

And all I can say is thank God for being young and naïve; that the woman who read my eye didn’t also read my palm and give us a forecast of the road that lay ahead. Because, although our Hollywood experience wasn’t going very well so far, and while we might not have moved out there just to be unemployed and laid up, you can’t tell from these photos. No. We look as hopeful, as optimistic, and in my case, as parasite-eyed as possible.

B
etween the last days of 2004 and first weeks of 2005, I get my broken foot in the door temping full-time at a production company in Hollywood; we find an affordable two-bedroom apartment in centrally located West Hollywood; and so that I can stop relying on Matt for rides to work, with a gracious loan from Bruce, I buy a five-year-old Toyota Echo from a woman in Glendale who is marrying a guy who “isn’t going to have his wife driving around in a five-year-old Toyota Echo.”

Meanwhile, having given up on finding work through temp agencies, Matt finds a job through a friend of a friend as an occasional assistant to the guy who writes lyrics for Barry Manilow. His name is Marty Panzer. Mr. Panzer lives, works, and chain-smokes out of his Sunset Strip one-bedroom apartment, the walls of which are adorned with many gold records as well as a giant-size oil painting of his mother.

Mr. Panzer doesn’t drive, so a large part of Matt’s job consists of chauffeuring him around in his Hyundai. Another part of his job includes heating up Mr. Panzer’s Lean Cuisines. At the end of each workday, Matt gets a check for $125 as well as a directive to either come back the next day or not.

It doesn’t take long living in Los Angeles to realize you spend the vast majority of your time surrounded by extremely ambitious, successful people, their assistants, and their possessions.

Our new apartment is located one block away from an auto mechanic shop that exclusively services super-high-end cars like Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. And because of the general overabundance of cars as compared to garage spots in Los Angeles, Matt and I find ourselves parking on the street in front of or behind a $300,000 car on a daily basis.

When you’re surrounded by such blatant success, it’s difficult not to be fueled by it, to be pushed by it. Yes, I wanted to be a writer and, most likely, a comedy writer, but if I were truly living the dream, I would also be a comedy
performer
.

That winter, I sign up for improv classes at the famous Groundlings theater, which is less than a mile from our new apartment and is where
Saturday Night Live
cast members like Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig started out.

As for Matt, he and his old friend Geordie, who just moved out to Los Angeles as well, team up and begin working on an idea for an urban fishing show. Geordie is an avid fisher from New York City, and of all the Saturday morning fishing shows he watches, he realizes that none of them is doing anything different from the others and certainly none touches upon the fact that there is actually great legal fishing in most major cities throughout the world. You simply need a permit and to know where to go.

Together, Matt and Geordie come up with a concept for a new kind of fishing show that could find a home on the Resort
TV Network or even ESPN. They call it
Urban Angling with Brooks Hoffstadt
—Mr. Hoffstadt being a comedic yet informative fictional character (played by Geordie) who while traveling to various cities (London, Paris, Chicago, etc.) on business, always finds time to sneak away and do a little fishing. Geordie has a small budget for this project, and they decide to shoot the pilot episode themselves on location in Central Park (the lakes of which, in case you didn’t know, are stocked with a variety of fish including smallmouth bass).

At the same time, Matt’s work with Mr. Panzer comes to a close. As he explains to Matt, he’s looking for his own personal Michael J. Fox. “You’re not Michael J. Fox,” he declares. Unable to argue with this, Matt accepts his last check and continues to search for work on Craigslist.

One position he ends up applying for is described as a
blackjack banker
. He goes on the interview and is hired right away. Though the job sounds strange and includes two weeks of intensive training, which he’s told not everyone makes it through, it is
paid
training and it is blackjack. He takes it.

What is a blackjack banker, you’re wondering? As we discover over the next two weeks, it’s actually quite complicated.

Gambling laws are different in California than those in other states—one difference being that California only allows games that are player vs. player, not player vs. house. For example, in Las Vegas—which allows games that are player vs. house—in a game of blackjack, the dealer acts as the house, so if the dealer busts, he or she pays out all of the players at the table who didn’t.

In California’s specific brand of player-vs.-player blackjack, however, one of the players must act as the house, and if he
busts, he has to pay out the other players at the table, which could very well be impossible if he has only twenty bucks in front of him and owes each of the other five players twenty bucks.

This is where Matt’s company enters the picture. They hire and train people like Matt to arrive at a blackjack table with a bulletproof case of $100,000 in chips and act as a player who agrees to be the “all-time banker” for eight-hour shifts at a time.

Matt’s first shift is at the Hollywood Park Casino in Inglewood from six p.m. to three a.m. on a Tuesday, with an hour break at midnight for dinner. And if success and ambition abound in West Hollywood, the complete opposite can be said for the Hollywood Park Casino, which on a weeknight is mostly filled with drunks and gambling addicts.

As we know, the house always wins (unless you happen to be in Vegas with your non-gambling girlfriend who forces you to quit while you’re up), so Matt’s company always won and Matt got paid an hourly wage. Sounds like a weird job, but hey, if you’d been unemployed for months and you like blackjack, it just might work.

But probably not.

Growing up with two doctor parents, you learn not to worry about your health. Nothing is ever a big deal to them, as displayed by Billy’s and my respective broken feet, which we were basically told to shake off.

So, when Matt calls me from his car about a week after quitting his blackjack banker job (as he realized he didn’t want to be the one taking money from gambling addicts at two o’clock in the morning) and tells me he thinks he is dying, it’s
really hard for me to believe. He was running an errand and had to pull over, thinking that he was going to die right there in his car. He’s less than three minutes away, so I convince him to get back in the car and drive home so that I can see him before he dies.

When he arrives back at our apartment, he won’t sit still; I can hardly get him to look at me. His skin is clammy and he’s pacing from room to room asking if he should call 911. I tell him he’s fine, that he’s young and healthy and breathing and that there is no way he could possibly be dying. But he won’t be stopped. And so I stand in our living room, which is empty, save for our recently purchased IKEA futon, and listen as he calls himself an ambulance.

I know he isn’t going to die, that he’s probably just having a panic attack, but at the same time, I don’t know anything about panic attacks beyond the way the two words are thrown around in casual conversation to connote a certain kind of freak-out.

When the paramedics arrive, I mostly just feel strange and slightly embarrassed about having these men in our sparse living room. And to be completely honest, when Matt asks one of them, “Am I going to die?” I have to suppress a giggle.

But of course, it isn’t funny.

They take him via ambulance to the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai, which is a few minutes from our apartment, and I follow behind in my new-to-me silver Toyota Echo—our second emergency-room visit in three months.

I know a lot about panic attacks now. I know how we humans are all wired differently, how some of us will always be more
anxious than others. I know how your mind can find ways of expressing itself in the body, how perhaps being twenty-three years old and going from feeling that your dreams are within arm’s reach to presently identifying as an unemployed (and seemingly unemployable) ex–blackjack banker within a matter of a few months might cause moments of panic, or physiologically speaking, surges of adrenaline, which cause your heart rate to rise, which can cause you to hyperventilate, which causes a lack of oxygen in the body, which will eventually cause you to pass out, unless of course you can manage to calm yourself down or seek medical treatment before things reach that level.

But back then, I had no idea about any of this. Back then, I remember recalling that character from
Pretty Woman
, the one walking Hollywood Boulevard, shouting:
Welcome to Hollywood! What’s your dream?