Birds of California(6)

“Wait!” Sam blurts, almost losing his blanket-toga as he scrambles to his feet. “What happened with the hipster glasses girl you were talking to last night?”

“Okay, seriously.” Erin huffs out a breath. “What’s going on with you?”

“Why does something have to be going on with me to ask about your romantic life?” Sam asks, wounded. “I’m sensitive.”

Erin snorts. “I don’t know if that’s how I’d describe you, exactly.”

Sam hitches up his blanket and shuffles over to the coffee maker. He has a bad, anxious feeling, and he probes the origins of it carefully, like he’s feeling around with his tongue for a rotten tooth. The nights have sort of started to smear together lately, if he’s being honest, but from what he can remember it was a good one: a bunch of people out on the patio at a Mexican place in West Hollywood, oysters and tequila and guacamole with lobster ceviche on top. A cute blond girl from a CW show who kept telling him how funny he was, even though he was pretty sure he wasn’t saying anything that hilarious. More drinks afterward, and the bartender coming back with his credit card: “It didn’t go through.”

Aha. It’s weirdly satisfying to figure it out, even though it makes him feel specifically, rather than generally, bad. All at once the memory is as clear as if Sam didn’t drink anything at all: “Whoops,” he said, smiling at the bartender even as dread and embarrassment wound a double helix up his spine. “Would you mind trying it again?”

“I tried it three times,” she reported.

“Once more?” he asked, tilting his head to the side in a way that gets him what he wants, usually. It got him what he wanted this time, too, but a moment later she was back again, sliding the card across the shiny bartop with a shake of her head.

“Sorry,” she said—quietly, which Sam appreciated. “No dice.”

In the end he had her run his debit card instead, which worked, thankfully, but when he pulled up his banking app he saw that not only had he maxed out his Amex, but that last round of cocktails—and he’d paid for everyone, he was feeling magnanimous—had left him with exactly $314.83 to his name.

It’s fine, Sam tells himself now, staring ineffectually at the coffee maker. He’ll get paid again in a week or so, though once he makes rent and his car payment and sends some cash home to Adam and his mom—

“Go for a run or something,” Erin advises, snapping him out of it. Sam swallows the anxiety back down into his chest where it belongs. “Or at least take a shower.” She raises her eyebrows, opens the door. “At your own house, even.”

“Your water pressure is better,” Sam protests weakly. Erin flips him the bird.

Once she’s gone he sits back down on the couch with his coffee and digs his phone out of his discarded jeans, blinking at the screen when he sees he’s got 412 text messages. Dread surges up like groundwater until he can almost feel the squish of it underneath his feet: he didn’t even have 412 text messages after the pilot of The Heart Surgeon aired last year. Right away he’s worried he accidentally tweeted something offensive about little people or made a sex tape when he wasn’t paying attention. He scrolls through the first few texts, the dread creeping coldly up past his ankles and his knees.

Dude, his trainer said at four forty-five this morning, tough break.

His agent, Russ, texted at five, which is when Sam knows he makes calls from his Peloton. Don’t panic. Call me. Let’s have lunch today.

Even his mom back at home in Milwaukee, a couple of hours ago: I tried calling, but you didn’t pick up! Remember we love you no matter what.

The dread is up to his neck now, and rising fast. Sam takes a deep breath like he’s getting ready to dive, then opens up his browser and types his own name into the search bar. The first news article to come up is from the Hollywood Reporter. The headline reads: “Midseason cancellations: Riptide, Lightning Jones done at ABN.”

Well, that’s okay, Sam thinks, his eyes flicking over the article. He’s not on Riptide or Lightning Jones. He keeps reading.

“Also axed: The Unlikelies, Half-Moon Bay, The Heart Surgeon.”

The Heart Surgeon.

Oh, fuck.

Sam jumps up off the couch, looking around wildly at Erin’s tidy living room. Belatedly, it occurs to him that he’s still completely naked. He doesn’t know what’s worse, the show being canceled or the fact that it was the third one down on the list of “also axed.” He thinks of his empty bank account. He thinks of the mortgage on his mom’s house in Wisconsin. He thinks of his Tesla sitting outside Erin’s apartment right now—she drove it back to Silver Lake, he remembers suddenly; he was too drunk—and feels a little bit like he’s going to be ill.

He knew this could happen, obviously. He just didn’t think it would happen to him.

Sam sets his coffee down on the end table and checks the clock on his phone: 9:48. Almost noon back at home, he reasons. Already after lunch on the East Coast. “Fuck it,” he mutters out loud, then opens Erin’s freezer and pulls out a bottle of vodka.

He calls Russ and gets his assistant, a bleached blond named Sherri who tells Sam to meet Russ for lunch on the patio at Soho House. “How you doing, kiddo?” she asks him. Sam doesn’t know why it’s Sherri of all people being nice to him that kind of makes him want to lie down in the middle of Sunset Boulevard and wait to get run over by a Star Tour.