Scrappy Little Nobody(21)

I managed to strike up a conversation with a girl in an audition waiting room once. She mentioned that she didn’t have a ride home. Frankly, she seemed a little annoying, but I was desperate for human company, so I offered to drive her. (Fingers crossed that she’s not crazy!) I immediately imagined telling people how my best friend and I might never have met if her car hadn’t broken down that morning. (Eesh. Fingers crossed that I’m not crazy.) In my car, I tried to play it cool. We made small talk; she said she’d grown up in LA, which made me doubly nervous. Then she rolled down the window, stuck her feet out, lit a cigarette, and changed the radio station. My new best friend was a real entitled bitch. I gave her my number when I dropped her off. She didn’t offer hers in return.

Some young neighbors invited me to a party they were having. When they collected five dollars from everyone for pizza I nervously told them I didn’t have any cash, but I would pay them back the next day. In the morning, I knocked on their door with my five dollars and they told me that someone had stolen the money. I assumed they suspected me. I’d been the only new person there. Did making a point to give my five dollars make me look more or less guilty? They assured me they didn’t think I’d done it. I never spoke to them again. Does including this story in my book make me look more or less guilty?

When I was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Camp, I thought I might make friends with my fellow nominees. I also thought my parents would know what the Independent Spirit Awards were, but they’ve never been good at faking enthusiasm, so that phone call was disappointing. Whatever, this was going to be great! I didn’t know how publicists or stylists worked, but I figured if you walked into a store at the Beverly Center mall and talked loudly about how you needed an outfit for a fancy award show, they’d offer you something eventually. That did not happen, but no worries, Anna, you’re substance, not style; just focus on the art. I watched all the films from my category, some of which were not easy to track down. I thought this would facilitate conversation, but it ended up making me look like a superfan. I assumed my fellow emerging artists would have done their research as well. I guess they were busy effortlessly fitting in.

I tried to keep in touch with my friends from home. People I’d known since childhood were scattered at colleges around the country, but they all seemed to be having the same euphoric experience. I would call them and feel destroyed by loneliness. It was almost comical. Me sitting on my bed (trying not to disturb my adult roommate) as someone told me how amazing everything was and their new friends called out for them in the background. They had the next four years of their lives mapped out for them, and I was pretending I didn’t see a homeless man asleep in the car next to mine.

I remember hearing somewhere that most people misremember their adolescence as entirely wonderful or (more often) entirely awful, when it was probably some combination of the two. My memory of my early time in LA suffers from this syndrome.

The first year was tough. I was lonely. I was broke. But things went from soul-crushing to tolerable in one evening. A friend of mine who was passing through LA took pity on me. He invited me to an American Idol viewing party with some of his friends. Most of the people there didn’t know each other, and I bonded with two dudes named Peter and Alex over our shared outrage when Jennifer Hudson was kicked off. We started hanging out almost nonstop. After a few weeks, Peter and Alex mentioned that they both happened to be apartment hunting. I awkwardly said, “Can I come, too?” I think they were more than happy to have a girl around to make it clear that they were not dating. (They were gay—in case the indignation over J. Hud’s dismissal from Idol didn’t tip you off—they just weren’t dating each other.)

I told Gwendolyn via email and with minimal notice that I would be moving out. You know, like a coward! At that point I’d already been unmasked as a nonresponsible, nontidy, noncourteous person, so what did I have to lose? I disassembled my desk and bed and reassembled them in a three-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood. That moving day was glorious. I was eighteen and living with two dudes in an apartment with new carpet. I took the smallest bedroom, so I could pay fifty dollars less a month. The fact that it had only one, very small window gave the room a minimum-security-prison vibe, but we made a group trip to Ikea and this time I bought the second-cheapest dresser they made to class the place up.

The first week we lived there, Alex and I woke up to find tar tracked across the living room carpet. Peter had drunkenly stepped through a construction site, and wouldn’t you know it—tar does not come out of carpet. Ever. I was pissed at Peter, but he was so lovable he got away with everything. It made the whole place look dingy and I had to nervously explain it away when I had anyone over. But we decided we’d rather lose the security deposit than pay to recarpet, so I attempted to hide the stain with an area rug. That decision essentially doomed the apartment to remain in its squalid state. But we figured we’d probably move in a year or so.

Alex and I were both under twenty-one, but Peter was of age and graciously bought alcohol for us. To save money on décor we exclusively drank Skyy vodka and artfully arranged the empty blue bottles in our living room. I hate day drinking now, possibly because it reminds me of this period. I think we drank just to feel like we were doing something.

For the most part, we had fun. We went to drag night at Micky’s and someone dressed as my character from Camp, which made me feel more like a superstar than I ever have since. We got stoned and watched scary movies. I smoked too much the night we watched The Amityville Horror and climbed up the back of the couch begging the boys to stop reading my thoughts. It wasn’t a great look, but this was the stuff that distracted me from the overwhelming uncertainty of my professional life.