You Can’t Be Serious(20)

Like thousands of actors, I went through this Back Stage West ritual every Wednesday in the hopes of even one audition, one phone call. I was hungry for experience! Anything that would allow me to build up credits on my résumé and work my way up the ladder to better, professional roles.

The problem was: I didn’t have that car yet. Taking the bus to auditions took several hours in each direction, and my frustration mounted. In LA, traffic affects EVERYTHING. It may seem like a minor thing to readers unaccustomed to LA traffic and car problems, and how much all people who live in LA talk about traffic and car problems like I’m doing right now, but it’s actually a really big deal. It’s like a member of your family you can’t stand but can’t stop talking about. Like my cousin Raghav who caught gonorrhea during the pandemic.1



* * *



Halfway through freshman year, I had settled nicely into Rieber Hall room 507 and was regularly spending time with some of the guys in my dorm. We initially met when one of them knocked on my door somewhat at random. “I’m DLC,” said a fun-loving bespectacled dude with tattoos and a wide grin. “This is my roommate Dennis. We call him Dennis Pennis. We’re in the room above you. 607. You wanna get some food?”

“Sure,” I said, appreciating the play on Dennis’s name for the same reason I enjoyed having a guidance counselor called Mrs. Cummings.

“Tite,” DLC continued. “I knocked on 707 first and they shut the door in my face.”

“Isn’t the seventh floor the quiet floor?” I asked.

“Yeah, but you ain’t gotta be shitty about it.”



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After months of applying for internships and being rejected, I landed one! It was a coveted gig at Star Wars creator George Lucas’s company Lucasfilm. Or rather, at the Lucasfilm satellite office in Burbank, about seventeen miles from campus. (The Lucasfilm headquarters is in Northern California.) The entire interview process was done over the phone, so I didn’t realize that the bus trip from UCLA to Burbank—including traffic and transfers—would take about three hours each way.

I was a full-time student, with classes every day of the week. It didn’t matter that I had a kick-ass internship for the people who created The Empire Strikes Back, there just wasn’t enough time in the day to spend six hours commuting on top of school, so I had to quit on day two. I was disappointed that I had to walk away, but I was way more frustrated that I had moved to a city with such terrible mass transit. As I got madder and madder about the need for a car in a place that called itself a “city,” I asked myself a critical question: Even if I could get my hands on a vehicle, where would I park it? I decided this was actually something I could have control over and should sort out as quickly as possible.

At UCLA there were way more students with cars than parking spaces on campus. You had to enter a highly competitive parking lottery to vie for a spot. If you were one of the few lucky winners, congratulations! What you won was the right to pay a few hundred bucks every eleven weeks for a permit to park in a lot. Everyone else had to fend for themselves, searching endlessly around Westwood, squinting at street signs.

Motivated by having to quit my Lucasfilm internship, I entered this parking lottery. You might be saying to yourself, But Kal, you didn’t have a car yet. Correct. I didn’t have a car. It was kind of like applying for a job that requires skills you don’t have—you’ll just learn them once you get the offer, right? Plus, I used my math brain to figure out that since the probability of winning the parking lottery was so low, if I entered it every quarter, my chances of getting a permit would increase exponentially as the years went on, so that by the time I could finally afford a car (which would likely happen in my third year of college), probability would dictate that I’d win the parking lottery and get a permit. Genius! Unfortunately, this is not at all how probability works, and I won the parking lottery on my first try.2

When word spread among the homies in the freshman dorm that I had scored a permit but didn’t have a car, Dennis Pennis knocked on my door with an offer.

DENNIS PENNIS: You want to share the Panoch?3

ME: What’s the Panoch, Dennis Pennis?

DENNIS PENNIS: You’ve never seen the Panoch?

ME: I don’t think so, what is it?

DENNIS PENNIS: The Panoch is the name of my car, man. I don’t have a parking permit, so I always gotta look on the street. What if we join forces and share? You pay for the permit and your share of gas. I pay for insurance and my share of gas. You can drive the Panoch anytime I’m not using it.

ME: YES.



I was a genius!

As soon as our friends learned that Dennis Pennis and I struck a deal, they started rooting for us in a way that made me suspicious. “Maaaaan,” said DLC, “your guys’ deal sounds super tite. You think you’ve got what it takes to drive the Panoch?”

What exactly did it take? “Is it stick? I actually can’t drive stick.”

“Nah,” DLC continued. “It ain’t stick. It’s the Panoch. The Panoch is super tite.”

My college buddies—especially DLC—had an understated, shorthand way of speaking when something was up. I once stumbled upon a pair of handcuffs with the key inside (as one does), so I handcuffed DLC and our buddy Zach together as a prank and walked away. I intended for this to only last a few minutes, but I’m so easily distracted, I forgot that I had handcuffed them until about four hours later. “Oh, it’s all good, man. You tite,” DLC said upon my return as I sheepishly unlocked the handcuffs. Except it wasn’t “all good”—the guys quickly jumped on me and carried me to a stairwell railing to which I was then handcuffed and left alone for four hours. (I clearly deserved it.)