Scrappy Little Nobody(20)

Does this wig make me look out of my depth? Or is that just my face?





moving to la


I was told as a child that if I wanted to be in entertainment, I shouldn’t have a backup plan. That is terrible advice. If things hadn’t worked out for me, I’d be an Uber driver or the world’s most prudish porn star. (Which doesn’t mean I would be an unsuccessful porn star; there’s a fetish for everything, ladies!) However, I’m glad I followed that terrible advice.

Don’t get me wrong, I wish I had more skills, but if I’d had a safety net, I would have used it. Sometimes the terror was so overwhelming that if I’d been offered an apprenticeship scrubbing the floor of a button factory (what do normal jobs look like?), I would have thought, Fine, I can’t take this anymore—sign me up, give me the health benefits, give me a time card and a mean boss and some goddamn security. I needed the fear. I needed to be forced to rely on myself, and the dream, and sometimes unemployment checks. (Thank you, US government! Please don’t repossess my house when I go all Grey Gardens!)

It’s obviously very lucky for me that, at the moment, acting is working out. This was not always the case. For a while there, if a casting director looked up from her clipboard, it was a good day. There are buildings in Los Angeles that still make me shudder when I drive past, the aura of rejection radiating off of them like a landfill on a hot day. I sometimes think that I should have a sense of pride knowing that I’ve achieved more than my sixteen-year-old brain would have ever let me imagine, but mostly it’s just the opposite.

I think self-doubt is healthy. And having to fight for the thing you want doesn’t mean you deserve it any less. Maybe I’m not supposed to mention that it was a fight, but I find that to be such an old-money attitude. I think I’m supposed to act as though I always knew I’d find success (not out loud, obviously—just using some heavy-handed subtext), but moving to Los Angeles felt like that dream where you’re naked in a grocery store, hoping that no one will notice. I figured I’d be discovered and thrown out at some point. I’m still waiting.

I came to LA without a car. I was unprepared for the move in a lot of ways, and thinking I could walk to a grocery store and back before a carton of milk spoiled was a pretty glaring one. Why didn’t anyone tell me you needed a car in LA? Because I didn’t know a soul who lived there. That was a much greater problem, of course, but one thing at a time!

Craigslist apparently existed back then, but no one I knew had heard of it, so I found an apartment the old-fashioned way—getting an email, six people removed, about a woman looking for a roommate. I crafted a few paragraphs about what a responsible, tidy, and courteous person I was and sent it to the woman in question. Gwendolyn was in her mid-twenties, and although she was nervous about me being from out of town—she didn’t want to babysit me—I assured her that I was very independent and I wouldn’t rely on her while I got settled. After a couple weeks of correspondence, once all the details had been worked out, I mentioned that I was seventeen—SEEYOUINAFEWDAYSCAN’TWAIT!

The day I arrived Gwendolyn was cautious but welcoming, and I made sure to do my very best impression of a capable human as proof that I wouldn’t be a burden. That day, I bought the cheapest desk and twin bed that Ikea made. For good measure, I got a couple of those ninety-nine-cent tea-light holders. I was taking Hollywood by storm and doing it in style.

I’d only ever seen two neighborhoods in Los Angeles, so I didn’t know what a sketchy area I was living in. I ignored the fact that the corner store had bars on the windows and that there were prostitutes outside at all hours. My gruff, disabled neighbor was clearly renting out the abandoned car in the garage to a homeless man, and the woman below me had night terrors, but I had candle holders and I was going to be a goddamn actress.

I’d been paid a decent amount for a failed TV pilot before I officially moved to LA, but when every cent you make has to last until your hypothetical next job, you don’t get comfortable. I had to stretch that paycheck indefinitely, but alas, I needed a car. I bought a used Toyota and named him Charlie, after Charlie Brown, because he broke down all the time.

The next pilot season was starting up, which meant I was usually sent on one to four auditions a day. I discovered MapQuest and wrote down directions by hand since I didn’t have a printer. Between that and my growing knowledge of the city, I was only getting lost, like, six times a day. Pilot season is grim because you’re sent in for everything, no matter how wrong you are for it. I kept a mountain of clothes and accessories in my trunk so I could go from the fourteen-year-old goth daughter on a TNT drama to the spoiled twenty-two-year-old receptionist on a workplace comedy. It’s obvious now that splitting my focus made it impossible for me to do well on any of them, but I was in no position to turn down auditions.

How do I describe my personal life during this time? I met funny, interesting people, I went to art galleries downtown, I performed a one-woman show for free on the street corner. Except none of that’s true. I was alone and freaked out and I stayed in my room a lot. I spent most of my time trying to find ways to occupy myself without spending money or ingesting calories.

I didn’t have any friends. Well, I didn’t know anyone. Which is the less depressing way to say I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t know how to make friends in LA. Usually when people move to a new city, it’s for school or for work. Unlike my friends who were entering college, I was not surrounded by packs of like-minded young people all equally eager to start new friendships. Unemployment and my lack of a fake ID were conspiring to turn me into a world-class recluse.