Scrappy Little Nobody(22)
A friend who worked at a catering company would occasionally need a temp last minute, pay me cash under the table, and let me have all the tuna Ni?oise I could eat. But most of the time I was praying that Law & Order would need a mousy little teen killer so I could keep paying my car insurance.
Because Peter had lived in LA the longest and was old enough to go out at night, Alex and I became close, at first out of convenience and then out of genuine shared love of making fun of everything and everyone, most of all each other. We watched pop concerts on DVD. We tried to take edgy photographs of each other on my three-megapixel camera. We discovered the “casual encounters” section of Craigslist and, naturally, posted an erotic plea to meet up in the bushes at the end of our street. We waited outside until two guys showed up and walked off together. We were like the creepy cupids of anonymous sex.
Brazen little beasts that we were, Alex and I were not satisfied with just drinking in our apartment. We wanted to drink with the rest of the world! At that time, clubs were the pinnacle of Los Angeles nightlife. Maybe they still are and I’m just out of touch. Unlike bars, these clubs were large and open and played their music at horrifying volumes. I didn’t know what went on in them, but I wanted to find out.
Alex knew a mysterious figure named Carlos who seemed to treat “going out” with the same urgency and focus as a mission from Homeland Security. The more I learned about LA nightlife, the more it seemed like a full-time job. Any decent subculture can sell you the promise that reaching the top of its hierarchy means you’ve accomplished something. Clubbing was no different. You went to the right club on the right night, which is to say you only went to the hardest clubs to get into, on the very hardest nights to get in. You spent all day primping and pregaming and all evening enjoying the fruits of your labor.
One night, Carlos asked us to meet him at Element, a name that inspired some reverence from Alex and, consequently, from me. We had to get in. We nervously explained to Carlos that while Alex had a fake ID, I did not. Carlos wasn’t worried. He told us to come anyway. I assumed he was going to sneak us through some back exit, but when we arrived he walked straight toward the bouncer. Barely breaking his stride, Carlos said, “She’s Ashley’s best friend,” and kept walking, dragging us behind him.
“Who’s Ashley?” I asked.
“Ashley Olsen. I told the owner she was coming by tonight. She’s not.”
I was not twenty-one and neither was Ashley Olsen, yet her name had gotten a stranger through the door of a nightclub without question. The mention of fame in any form, even underage fame, cloaked me from suspicion. Personally, I was thrilled to hear the promise of her attendance was a ruse—I imagine if Miss Olsen had arrived I would have been thrown at her feet like the peasant I am and dragged out of the club.
The inside looked like a minimalist parody of itself. It was just a dark, empty space with black boxes laid out in different formations, serving as tables or chairs. The music was blaring.
“Why isn’t anyone dancing?” I shouted.
If this had been the TV version of my life, a character would have explained that you don’t dance, you just stand around looking cool. Unfortunately, people don’t explain things like that in real life—they want you to shut up and blend in until you figure it out. Luckily for Carlos, the music was SO loud that he could reasonably pretend he hadn’t understood me and trot away toward someone more interesting. Alex and I were left standing by ourselves. He seemed to immediately understand that we’d stumbled into some inner circle and playing along was the name of the game. I continued shouting.
“I don’t get it; there’s all this space, the music is too loud to have a conversation, but we’re not supposed to dance? Are you just supposed to stand around looking at each other?” Alex was trying to telepathically communicate, Yes, *, you are. Okay?
I kept going. “Do they have to keep the music this loud because no one in Los Angeles has anything to say to each other?” I thought constantly making fun of LA made me look smart. Alex ignored me and eventually I got the message that if I was so annoyed by the situation, I was free to leave. Sadly, the truth was that I was equally under the spell of the nightlife mythos. It didn’t matter if you weren’t having fun; you pretended that you were and bragged about it later. I wanted to do the bragging bit, so I shut my mouth and stayed.
For a while Alex and I engaged with the nightclub culture as frequently as we could. My interest in getting into these clubs didn’t last long. (It would vanish completely after my twenty-first birthday because, like guys who play hard to get, or Tickle Me Elmo, or your first period, sometimes you only want a thing until you have it.) But at nineteen I did spend a short and regrettable period in a classic trap: trying to fit into something I hated, just to prove to myself that I could.
Once I realized (to my great relief) that Hollywood Party Girl was something I was not destined to be, I found increasingly joyous ways to spend my time.
Instead of privately obsessing over them, I forced Peter to help me rehearse audition scenes. The terrible roles were far more fun (and more frequent) than the good ones. The horror scenes were especially good fodder, and we’d end up screaming bloody murder and chasing each other around the apartment. It’s weird that I never got those roles.
When some of my California-native friends heard I’d never been to Disneyland, they insisted on taking me that very moment, even though it was pissing rain. We ran around the park soaking wet but almost completely alone. I started teaching myself to bake, I went to an unreasonable number of costume parties—why did my friends throw so many costume parties? I rediscovered my favorite things—long walks and great movies—and eventually the darkness and power that I’d projected onto the city started to dissipate. I hadn’t booked a job or improved my financial situation, but I was going to be okay. Then a funny thing happened.