Going Down in La-La Land Read online

  Hollywood or Bust

  When I mentioned the idea of moving back into my parents’ home in Las Vegas for a short time my mother almost had a cardiac arrest. The thought of having either one of her two children back in her house frightened her beyond imagination. I suppose I would have taken it harder if she hadn’t felt the same way about my older sister, who is the opposite personality type of myself, mainly heterosexual and, for the most part, conservative.

  Mom had always been irritable and nervous when we were around, even as children. As a child I could play at the neighbor’s house till nine p.m. and she wouldn’t have noticed. Actually I could have been out till dawn and she would have preferred it. She was loving and generous in her own way, always sending help when I needed it most. But at the same time, her kids just drove her plain nuts.

  It didn’t help that she was a tad bit on the obsessive-compulsive side when it came to keeping her house clean. She ran around the place with a Dust Buster in hand 24-7. She could give Joan Crawford a run for her money when it came to having an obsession with cleanliness.

  “Ish! Ish!” and “Kaka!” were her favorite expressions as she raced around the house with a dust cloth and a can of Pledge.

  “I can’t believe how much cat hair there is around this place from just yesterday. Adam, did you brush the goddamned cat today?” she’d bellow across the house.

  The Dust Buster was her most favorite object in the whole world. If you left one crumb on the counter you risked having her shout expletives at you for an hour, despite the fact it gave her the opportunity to use her favorite toy. All the while she’d go on at length and berate, “Do you know how long and hard your father stands on his feet to pay for a nice home while you do your best to shit the place up?”

  While my dad is the most easygoing and loving guy on the planet, the idea of having his wife going nuts every day and fighting back and forth with his kid didn’t appeal to him. My mother always wore the pants in the house anyway. So my idea of returning back home a little while to save money, look into grad school, and get grounded never stood a chance to begin with.

  I continued to weigh my possibilities. By luck, I had joined the Screen Actors Guild a few months before deciding to move. I was working a nowhere job in an ugly payroll office in Midtown near Grand Central and was bored out of my skull. One day someone tipped me off that there was a call for extras in Woody Allen’s new film that very afternoon. The casting happened to be two subway stops from where I was working, so I decided to check it out, figuring if it was mobbed by people I would just get a slice of pizza and hop back on the number 6 train.

  Surprisingly there turned out to be only a small line at the church where the call was. Even more surprising was the presence of Woody Allen himself, sitting at a table surrounded by casting women and assistants. They all wore Prada outfits and had their hair pulled back the same way, reminding me of the type who recently graduated from Vassar and worked a job in a PR firm. Woody Allen looked like the result of a Dr. Moreau experiment with an owl. I stood there in front of him for less than a minute while he looked me over and then scribbled something on my head shot that had been handed to him.

  “Okay, thanks,” the production assistant standing next me said after he finished scribbling and placed my picture aside.

  A few weeks later the phone rang and someone asked if I would like to be an extra in the film. For three days I stood next to Leonardo DiCaprio outside the Stanhope Hotel with a prop camera hanging around my neck. The gig consisted of yelling and grabbing at him along with a gaggle of annoying preteen girls and actors impersonating the paparazzi and police officers.

  In the extra list my name was described as “oddball fan.” One of the crew informed me that at first Woody Allen had me in mind to play a stalker, but that idea was scrapped. Something about the way I looked must have really disturbed Woody Allen, because a few times I caught him gazing at me with fear in his eyes. Despite the fact he thought I made a convincing fanatic, during filming when I asked him to sign my wardrobe snapshot, he graciously obliged. Soon-Yi made a visit to the set carrying a really ugly straw purse that she probably shelled out more money for than what most people make in a month.

  I said nothing to Leonardo DiCaprio the whole time, figuring he did not want to be bothered by some tall, gay extra looming beside him. Besides, he had his hands full with the obnoxious prepubescent girls.

  “Girls, relax!” an exasperated Leo snapped on the third day of filming, up to his wits end with their constant screaming.

  “Oh, whatever,” one of the more overconfident and smartass prepubescent teens rolled her eyes and shot back. “Listen to you trying to be all cool. Girls, Relaaax!” she proceeded to impersonate and mock the world-famous heartthrob, leaving him speechless and feeling a bit stupid.

  By the third day the little bitches become so bratty that I wanted to bitch slap them across the street into Central Park. I’m sure Leo would have liked to join in.

  A few months later Titanic opened and I found myself standing next to him in various fanzines. I looked like an out-of-place dolt in those pictures, with a camera hanging around my neck and wearing ugly corduroy pants given to me by wardrobe. It didn’t help that I was standing next to the hottest young star in the world wearing a great pair of black leather pants.

  On the brighter side, the gig made me eligible to join the actors union, an opportunity many people would kill for. So I borrowed money from an ex-boyfriend and joined, thinking it would help lead to the dreams of stardom that had brought me to New York in the first place.

  If I moved to LA, at least I could work as an extra with my SAG card if a job didn’t turn up right away. Since my degree didn’t even qualify me to get a job as a waiter, my SAG status made me feel a little more secure. A more important influence in my decision was when my parents told me there was no way I could stay with them for an extended period of time.

  Candy came to my rescue and offered to let me stay at her place until I got settled. We had spoken to each other regularly since she moved to LA. I was always waiting to hear when her big break would come

  “Adam, I’m telling you, you’ll love it out here. The weather is great. Today we had sun all day long,” she would tease over the phone after I had trudged home in the frigid cold.

  I reasoned my parents were only five hours away from LA, so if worse came to worse I would have family nearby. Okay . . . well, at the very least I hoped if things got really bad my mother wouldn’t let me live in the streets.

  So with that all in mind I began packing my bags. I hung around New York long enough to get my security deposit back on the apartment, then jumped on a flight to Vegas, to start what I envisioned would be a less stressful life filled with promise.

  The two weeks in Vegas were excruciating. The heat was brutal, and my cousin was staying for the summer so my mother was already on the brink of a nervous breakdown. My arrival nearly drove her over the edge. To earn a little extra money and stay out of my mother’s way I paraded around Caesar’s Palace in Roman soldier gear, even though I didn’t quite meet gladiator standards. Having Japanese tourists giggle and pose for pictures with me was better than arguing at home.

  My mother was still pissed I didn’t follow her advice and get a job with an advertising agency back in New York. I used the two weeks to find a car, stay out of my mother’s way, and head for LA.

  Candy had given me directions to her place a few days earlier. Halfway through the drive there I was already sick of being in a car, stuck on overcrowded freeways. Not a good sign for someone about to settle in southern California. It was a typical LA moment when I arrived at her apartment to find Candy was at the gym. Her ex-boyfriend Dean, who was just as stupid as ever, answered the door. Apparently he had followed her to LA with aspirations of becoming an actor himself.

  I gathered he hung around her apartment when Frank was out of town, which was most of the time. He was probably crashing from place to place, a total mess. Long
ago I had given up trying to understand Candy’s relationships with men. As far as I was concerned it was her business.

  “Yeah, man, I love Vegas,” Dean grunted while I prayed for Candy to get home soon. “Lots of good pussy there, man.”

  Luckily I only had fifteen uncomfortable minutes of trying to make conversation with the moron before Candy came back.

  “Hi, Adam!” she called as she bounced in through the front door, dressed in designer workout gear from head to toe.

  “Hey you!” I jumped up in relief at the sight of her and ran to give her a hug.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  “Starving.”

  “Damn it, Dean! I thought I asked you to put the dishes away!” she yelled toward the bedroom before telling me “We’ll go to the Abbey. It’s really nice. We can sit outside, and there’s plenty of hot gay guys there.”

  For some reason Candy always felt compelled to integrate a gay destination when we went out together. After my tiring day I wasn’t really thinking about meeting somebody. We could have gone to a taco stand and I would have been just as happy.

  Waiting for her to shower and get dressed, I looked forward to my first night out on the town and going somewhere where the two of us could catch up, minus the on-again, off-again, temporary lunkhead boyfriend of hers.

  As we walked out of the apartment toward the elevator the door to the adjoining apartment opened and a petite dark-haired woman appeared. Her face had obviously been lifted and was heavily made-up. Her dark hair shined with vibrant copper streaks. Gold and diamonds glittered from her neck, wrists, and hands. She was wearing expensive low-slung jeans and a tank top that had BEBE written across in little rhinestones.

  “Cahn-dee!” she pronounced in a shrill accent. “Did you know the ex-ter-mee-na-teer did not come deese month for thee bugs to spray zem with?”

  “Really Orly? That’s terrible,” Candy answered, trying to appear concerned.

  “Yes!” the woman’s eyes grew big. “But I call zee manager already, so he tell me the man come tomorrow!” She finished with satisfaction, apparently very proud at having taken control of the missing exterminator. I could now place her accent as Middle Eastern. It had that heavy wail to it.

  “Orly, this is my friend Adam. He will be staying with me for a while, so I wanted you to meet him. He just moved from New York,” Candy said.

  “Ooohhh! Heellooo!” Orly practically screeched. “I love New York See-teee. So bee-eww-tee-ful!” she gushed and went on with an enormous smile.

  We stood and listened to her babble for what seemed like forever until Candy was finally able to break us away.

  “Just so you know,” Candy warned on the way to her car, “she is the eyes and ears of the building and complains about everything, so just be real nice and butter up to her. At first she hated me, especially when Frank and I would fight. The woman can’t stand noise. But I’ve managed to warm up to her, and have even had her over for coffee a few times, so now she’s cool with me. Otherwise she is kind of a trip. She’ll keep talking to you for hours about when she was Miss Israel 1967, or some shit like that.”

  The Abbey was a classy place, with a coffee bar where one could order a nice meal and an outside bar where one could get drinks. A courtyard surrounded the outside bar and was filled with tables and statues behind a wrought iron fence. When you stepped inside you really did feel as though you had entered a real abbey, that is, an abbey filled with cruising gay men instead of nuns. Surrounding the preening and posing queers were tall outdoor heat lamps placed around the outside bar, meant to keep people warm during the winter months. A lot of outdoor places in LA had them, and I would soon find I had to be careful whenever I was around them to keep my head from getting singed, a hazard tall people in LA deal with on a seasonal basis.

  In the middle of her dinner Candy spotted an actor she was friendly with named Kyle, who was one of the stars of a network sitcom called She’s On Her Own. He was walking around with another guy, looking about the crowd as if expecting something to happen.

  Candy grabbed his arm and shouted up, “Hey! Kyle!”

  Hey looked down, surprised for a moment like he had no clue who she was.

  “It’s me. Candy. Gary’s friend,” she said sweetly.

  His eyes got really big behind designer horn-rimmed glasses, and he said in an overly enthusiastic and affected voice “Hey! How are you?”

  It turned out they knew each other from New York, where they had a mutual friend named Gary, a gorgeous gay guy and sex addict who after realizing that jerking off in front of his apartment window for various neighbors every night wasn’t acceptable behavior, began attending Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings.

  As Kyle sat down I wondered if he had ever fucked Gary. From what I knew of Gary’s track record I decided the answer was probably yes.

  Kyle’s friend Collin worked for one of the studios in town. Both guys seemed friendly when introduced to me. Tinges of excitement and delight came upon me when they pulled up their chairs. My first night in LA, and here I was dining outside under the stars in a trendy hangout and already mingling with the stars down here on Earth. It was a very cool start to my new life in sensational southern California. If meeting people was going to be this easy, I shouldn’t have any trouble building a career and finding my niche in the world of entertainment.

  “It’s Adam’s first night in town; he just got here!” Candy announced.

  “Really?” Collin said. “What brings you here?”

  “Well, I just felt it was time that”—but before I could finish Kyle suddenly cut me off and said, “What is with that guy’s shirt? Is he working a landing strip? That color would stand out on the stage of the Moulin Rouge!”

  The two were full of more stinging comments. Their body language, such as the way they splayed their legs out and the disinterested expressions on their faces, gave a clear message of cocky arrogance. To make matters worse, they thought it was funny that they had this little game going which involved flipping people off under the table.

  “Oh, I don’t like that one’s pants,” one would point out. “He gets a finger.” Or, “Check that queen out. She needs to lay off the steroids big time. You know what that means—finger.”

  Listening to these guys one would think that everyone else was dog shit in comparison. I focused on my fusili pasta and vegetables as they went on directing insulting quips toward every other person in the Abbey.

  I went from happy to be sitting with a minor sitcom star to wondering why Kyle thought he was such hot shit. As he sat on his invisible throne, it was imperative for him to avoid contact with anyone. God forbid someone noticed him.

  Never mind we were in an environment completely designed for interaction. In actuality none of the guys around, many of whom were quite attractive, seemed to notice him and if they did, didn’t give a rat’s ass.

  When not looking like he was afraid to be approached, he wore an expression of perpetual boredom.

  I kept thinking about how whenever I caught his show on the tube I never bought for a minute the fact his character was interested in the female lead. I wonder if the other people watching at home felt the same? I mean, he was so obviously gay. But then I thought about it some more and decided that there were people out there in places like Kansas where the idea never crossed their minds. Candy tried to keep a conversation going, but it was useless.

  “Okay, let’s find someone else. Next victim,” Kyle said while darting his head around. His eyes were like scanners, darting back and forth and back and forth.

  Finally Candy couldn’t take it any more and after being interrupted for the hundredth time, said sweetly, “You know, Kyle, if you want someone you find interesting to flip off you can always go home, look in the mirror, and give yourself the finger.”

  A sly smile came across Kyle’s face and he laughed, “Touché!”

  After getting the hint that everyone, including Collin, thought his game was tired and lame, he
grew bored and asked Collin if he was ready to leave.

  “So give me a call sometime, we’ll hang out or something. If you talk to Gary tell him I said hi,” Kyle said before disappearing into the crowd.

  “Nice meeting you both.” Collin smiled, then turned to me, winked, and said, “Good luck!”

  “Whatever. I’ll never hear from them again,” Candy said through sips of her apple martini, apparently the trendy drink of the moment. Every other person in the place also had a bright green martini in hand with a sliver of apple hanging off the side.

  “Could you believe how stuck on himself he was? Everyone else is fly shit ’cause they’re not on some sitcom. Give me a fucking break,” she said disinterestedly.

  “Do most people out here behave like that?” I asked.

  “Some of them,” Candy shrugged. Then stopping to reconsider admitted, “Well, a lot of them. But you’ll get used to it.”

  We sat gazing at the meticulously groomed and manicured crowd, some of which stood in clusters while others weaved their way among them, checking out the bodies as they went.

  “Well,” she sighed, breaking me out of my trance, “do you want dessert?”

  “That’s all I’ve thought about the whole time Mr. Finger was sitting here,” I replied.

  The Abbey boasted a really great dessert case at their coffee bar, a plethora of cakes, pies, brownies, and more sinful treats to taunt the body-obsessed patrons. I could just visualize scores of gym queens feeling guilt ridden when they sprang up the next morning and raced to spin class. Candy got up to get a piece of the Oreo cookie cheesecake confection we had spotted earlier.

  Staying seated to save our table, I took a moment to observe the crowd. It seemed to me that there was a lot more posing and less interaction going on. I didn’t remember it being quite so bad in New York.

  My first evening didn’t shed a favorable light on the prospects of meeting a great guy at a place like this. But this was only my first night in town, so I wouldn’t be too quick to judge.