Box Girl (10 page)

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.