You Can’t Be Serious(19)
As for me that summer, I went back to the classifieds. That farmhand job was still open, so I took it. Working twelve hours a day in the hot sun felt like honest work. I loved being outside, and I saved up enough money to get those headshots. I didn’t even need a gym that year! Turns out loading boxes of vegetables into tractors all season long will turn you into a pretty ripped twink.
It was a weird detour to end my time in New Jersey, and a good lesson in getting clear about what my priorities were. A car was still far off, but I’d be heading to LA with a little extra cash and my integrity intact. For now.
1?Just kidding, jeez.
2?I told you, I am a huge nerd.
CHAPTER FIVE THE PANOCH
Flying to Los Angeles for college felt like moving to a different country. From the laid-back people to the crawling traffic, it was nothing like the aggressive New Jersey culture I had grown up in. My suburban hometown was always on the go. We filled each hour of the day with a task, a hobby, sucking the marrow out of life—or at least sucking the ricotta out of the cannoli—twenty-four seven. After my summer of Adonis-transforming farmhand work, I was ready to take this attitude with me to LA, ready to achieve my dreams.
My parents dropped me off at Newark Airport for my Continental Airlines flight to LA. I had checked a large green military-looking duffel bag with just the basics: clothes, sneakers, toothpaste, and a towel. My mom’s close friend Hansa Auntie, who lived about an hour south of LA, would drive up the next day to help me sort out the shower supplies and bedding.
On my first day at UCLA I met Todd, my freshman orientation roommate. A super-relaxed blond dude from Orange County, Todd dressed and sounded like a movie version of a surfer, even though he had never actually surfed. He endeared himself to me quickly, because every time he spoke, his statements came out like questions: “Hi dude? It’s nice to, like, meet you? My name’s, uhhh, Todd?” Perpetually on-the-go New Jerseyans are a highly declarative people who speak very clearly, and with our hands, so this statements-as-questions thing was new to me. (You won’t hear anyone from New Jersey say, “Go, like, uhh, fuck yourself?”)
Like was a no-no in my world to begin with. Back at FPAC, my affable and demanding acting teacher, Mr. Kazakoff, had a laser focus on language. Kaz hated the word like. “If you can’t introduce yourself to a director without using the word like,” he’d explain, “if you can’t have a conversation about the beats of a scene without using the word like, if you can’t get through a sentence in the English language without using the word like, people will think you are stupid and they’ll cast someone else. Your ability to communicate is key.”
Using the L-word had serious consequences. The first time you said like in his classroom, Kaz would put your name on the board. Each time after that, he added a line next to it, the way cartoon inmates do on prison walls, or college students tracking the number of drinks they’ve had on their arms. From any other teacher, this might have been a pointless hassle. But Kaz was revered. With acid-washed jeans, ponytail, and wire-rimmed glasses, he cut a singular figure. Truly cool, respected teachers are rare, so a public shaming by one of the best is both highly amusing and very effective. Kaz taught us that you are what you say. Filler words weaken your speech. Flabby use of language could make a budding actor less competitive in the creative marketplace. By the end of the year, almost no one in the class said like.
On the West Coast, clear speech and fiery East Coast motivation were my secret weapons. Todd was far from the only person in California who talked like he just woke up from a nap. I’d show up to student-film audition waiting rooms full of preposterously attractive, chiseled dudes—and the “like” ratio was off the charts. Pretty soon casting directors were regularly complimenting me for being “articulate.” Sure, some of them meant it in the casually racist way, like, “Where did you learn to speak such proper English, brown person?” But many of them also meant it in the actual way! Overusing like as a slang interjection doesn’t mean you’re stupid, but it does, like, make you seem a little flaky? In a city of Todds, I stood out.
Even with my no-“like” secret weapon and East Coast hustle, as I threw myself into the process of trying to become a professional actor, I knew that breaking into Hollywood was going to be a long, hard struggle. It is for almost everybody. My parents regularly called and encouraged me to have a fallback plan. I regularly responded by telling them with confidence that those who have fallback plans end up falling back on them, so instead, every Wednesday morning, I would walk from my dorm down to the newsstand on Gayley Avenue in Westwood to buy the Back Stage West trade paper and scan casting listings, circling any of the projects that I convinced myself I was remotely qualified for. I’d scribble notes in the margins that I’d turn into personalized cover letters, which included my brand-new pager number. (I learned early on that I couldn’t trust Todd to accurately write down messages.)
I went through the same process with lists of prospective agents who were looking for new clients. Hours of my precious time and farmhand money were spent physically printing, cutting, and stapling headshots and résumés in my dorm room before walking the envelopes down to the post office and mailing them to casting directors for those unpaid jobs, and to agents for potential representation. If I had a little extra money that week and wanted to splurge, I’d take the stack of headshots down to Kinko’s, where I’d pay to have the résumés printed. (This allowed me to use their industrial-size paper cutter, which saved hours compared to cutting each eight-and-a-half-by-eleven résumé by hand, getting it to fit the dimensions of the eight-by-ten headshot.)