In late 1999, I spent $25,000 of my company’s money to fly an entire television crew to California just to meet a girl who left me stranded, alone at 2 a.m. at a dildo store on Sunset Boulevard. This was the calm before the millennium, and my first trip to Los Angeles. I had no intention of ever going home. Of course, none of that worked out, but I did meet O. J. Simpson at the hotel bar, woke up to an earthquake, and spent two days at the Playboy Mansion. Also, dildo store.
That’s how my year ended. Now let me tell you how I got there.
In the few years leading up to this, the TV show had grown, so we now had more staff, which took some of the heat off me, but I was still somewhat ostracized and definitely not trusted by my co-workers. I did my best to bond and be cool with everyone else, but I always got the sense that people were holding back, as if anything they said to me was going to get back to our boss. People still thought we were sleeping together.
The show was now produced out of a small corner of a much larger area of the newsroom, with six desks, a TV, and one computer with the Internet. The desk in the far back was empty and semi-private. It was surrounded on three sides with cubicle wall, and nobody ever went back there. This was the Cry Corner. At least a few times a month, one of the people on the show—a producer, intern, or researcher—would wind up back there to just let it out. My boss had carefully crafted and expertly curated the most toxic work environment any of these people had ever experienced. It was a work of art—it was, and still is, legendary—and the few years leading up to 1999 were a revolving door. New people would be hired from outside, others transferred to our show from other departments at the station. None of them lasted.
One woman I worked with, a wicked talented producer with more than a decade of experience, pulled me aside on her last day. “Get away from her,” she told me. “Far away from her.”
I did not listen.
Every now and then someone on staff would ask me how I managed to do it: how I hadn’t killed her or myself after all the years I’d been there. What I wanted to say was, “Well, that’s because I’m dead inside,” but what I always replied, without fail, was “You get used to it.” This never went over well because it was never enough. It was a bullshit answer, and they all knew it.
Truth was, I had no identity. So much of my self-worth was tied up in what I did for the show, what I did for my boss. That job was my life, and I measured my days based on how much abuse and manipulation I could handle while still moving forward. How I felt didn’t matter, and I considered any day that I could actually stomach food as a huge win. I’d convinced myself that happiness at work was a luxury for the weak.
But I never wanted anyone to feel the way I did. I’d always try to help the other staff through the rough parts, and when our boss left the building, which was always within sixty seconds of the show wrapping, I’d let everyone know she was gone, and watch a collective sigh wash over our small crew.
Every day, after work, I took two buses, a subway, then a streetcar back downtown. The whole trip took just over ninety minutes. I never read or listened to music or made small talk with other commuters. I always sat alone, but never liked being alone. I was always more comfortable on a bus rammed with people than one that was empty. Most nights, I stopped for a beer at a bar, then headed home to mess around on the Internet before leaving for a club. Everything was new then. There was no Instagram, Amazon, or iTunes and everything online took forever. If you did a Yahoo search for “boobs” but forgot an o you’d wait a full five minutes for a page of famous Bobs to show up before you could fix your mistake. I quickly became a Bob expert.
I remember watching CNN when they were doing a story about virtual chat rooms, and I was hooked. According to them, these were either the future of human connection or a predator’s playground. Turns out, they were both. The best was CU-SeeMe, developed in the early ’90s by Cornell University. By today’s standards, it was laughable and archaic. Absolute shit. Black-and-white, pixelated, and choppy as hell. Imagine a Zoom call with twenty strangers who looked like eight-bit Mario characters with a forty-five-second refresh rate—if you were lucky. I used these, off and on, from about 1997, talking to strangers and flirting.
Doing anything sexual was always an embarrassing disaster, so for the most part, we kept our clothes on. I never used a fake name, like I had on the telephone chat lines in college, but otherwise the experience was very much the same. I was always more comfortable talking to people I knew nothing about, who knew nothing about me. Some of my closest relationships were entirely based on typing four or five words at a time and holding up hand-drawn pictures to a web-cam sketched-out on a Post-it.
I chatted, off and on, with a woman named Alexis: LaLaLexi2001 was her handle. She was in her mid-thirties, cool as hell, and we’d meet up on CU-SeeMe around the time I got home from work, which was mid-afternoon for her in L.A. She was a SoCal short-haired blonde with dark roots, who worked in Big Tech. I didn’t really know what Big Tech was then, but she seemed to be doing okay for herself. When we were online, she’d grab her camera to walk it around her giant warehouse space in Studio City and show me around.
She and her crew rode dirt bikes inside. They had a wall of TVs just for video games, and every now and then she flashed stacks of cash to the camera. She was loaded. She said she was loaded, anyway. She called me, and everyone else, “bitch” before it was cool, and had the most incredible tan lines I’d ever seen over black-and-white dial-up video. I’d never met anyone like her. She was a little bit of Emily Valentine from 90210 mixed with Watts from Some Kind of Wonderful and a whole lot of Helen Slater from The Legend of Billie Jean.
Going into 1999, if you worked in TV, your life was consumed with Y2K and the millennium. There was mass-media mass hysteria, and everyone was losing their shit. Shows spent tons of cash to build over-the-top year-end shows. These meetings had been going on for months. In late fall, after weeks in a boardroom, and hundreds of ideas tossed around, someone suggested we do something around Hugh Hefner and Playboy’s millennium issue. Hef was hot at the time. He was freshly divorced, and he was back! GQ or Esquire had just done a huge feature on him, and how the mansion, after years of being a family home, was once again open for (sad and pervy) business.
I immediately shot up my hand and yelled over everyone, “I have a contact at the Playboy Mansion.” I had no contact at the Playboy Mansion. I followed that up with, “I can get us an interview with Hef, and get a camera into their millennium party. No problem.” Again, I knew nobody at the Playboy Mansion.
“Yes!” my boss yelled. “Sex 2000! Sin is IN!” She was already coming up with titles for the special.
I got to it. This was all I knew how to do. I worked the phones, lied, and promised the moon to anyone at Playboy who’d take my call. By the end of the next week, I delivered on everything I’d promised in that meeting. This was by far the biggest hustle I’d ever pulled, although that year I’d put some impressive shows together and booked more “impossible” guests than I could count. I really hated work, but I was goddamn good at it, and I built an incredible reputation as the guy who could book anyone. But the Playboy thing I was particularly proud of. It was a way to covertly get back at my boss for all the shit I’d put up with, and at the company that sat back and said nothing. We hired a kick-ass crew, got the budget approved, and off we went. A day with Hef, and full camera access to the millennium party at the Playboy Mansion.
The Playboy Mansion was in Los Angeles. La La Lexi was in Los Angeles.
“Roz! Get your ass in here, bitch!” These were the first words La La Lexi said to me in person. She was parked, taking up two spots, out front of my hotel in an old Jeep, standing up on the driver’s seat hanging out the top, jumping and waving her arms around while screaming at me.
I didn’t have a cell phone that worked in America, so this whole date was set up over email before I left Toronto. The crew and I had landed just a few hours earlier, and I was dealing with jet lag for the first time in my life. I was exhausted, and knew I had to be up early the next morning to head to the Playboy Mansion, so I promised myself I wasn’t going to go too hard.
Lexi was fucking rad, and she was making a total scene. I’d never actually heard her voice clearly before and was blown away by just how L.A. she sounded. She didn’t seem real. I didn’t know her, and she sure as hell didn’t know me, but when I jumped into that Jeep and kissed her for the first time, I was done. This was it. It was goddamn electric. She reached behind the passenger seat, grabbed a King Can of Bud, jammed it between my legs, and told me to keep it down as she peeled out of the parking lot.
“Do you want the bullshit PG tourist version of L.A., or the trashy version of L.A.—my version? Okay. Good!” She said all of this even before I had a chance to open my mouth.
For the next four or five hours we did it all, with the roof down. I was still a mystery to her. She knew nothing about me and didn’t seem to care. I’d never felt so free. This was a total reinvention for me, a bloody awakening. After we drove through the hills, stopping every now and then to make out a little and crush another beer, she took me down to Sunset Boulevard. We passed the Whiskey, the Roxy, and the Rainbow Room. This was the exact strip of road that bred every band I ever loved growing up. It felt like home. Like I’d gone to the Mothership.
I was always drawn to Southern California. When my dad was eighteen, lost and broken, and in desperate need of a fresh start and reinvention, he wound up in L.A. He found his escape in the United States Marine Corps. I found mine in La La Lexi. A girl who within the first hour of meeting had me barefoot, standing with her on the front hood of her purple Jeep, with her face pressed against my back and her hands reached around my waist, jammed into my front pockets as we slow danced under the California stars. The whole thing was weird, wonderful, and totally embarrassing, but so was Los Angeles. La La Lexi kissed with her eyes open, tasted like vanilla and American cigarettes, and flicked the front of my pants and yelled “Whoopsie!” when she accused me of having a boner. I’d never even seen a palm tree before, and here I was, falling in love like a guy in a poorly reviewed Hollywood rom-com with a leading man nobody would ever pay money to see. All of this with a total stranger I’d met on the Internet.
California was everything my dad said it was. His stories of L.A. in the late ’60s were fascinating, and like all his other stories, they evolved over the years. My story was evolving by the minute. As we drove down Sunset for the third time, I put my head against the back of the seat, closed my eyes, and rehearsed how I was going to tell my parents I’d met the love of my life on my first night in L.A. I was never coming home because there was no coming back from this. I was brand-new. I was writing my own love story, second by second, that would blow even my parents away.
“Here we go! Hang on,” Lexi half-laughed/half-yelled, as she whipped the Jeep into a parking space right out front of a sex shop on Sunset. This place was nothing really special at all. Average, actually, but Lexi walked in there like it was her second home. She seemed to know where everything was and cruised the aisles loading up a basket like she was picking apples. Fuzzy things, hard things, leather things, things that took double-D batteries—all the things. I slapped my company Amex card on the counter, paid for everything, and she helped the guy who worked there load it all up into a black plastic bag. She was in a hurry, and I was nervous as hell.
As we were about to walk out, she grabbed a shirt off the last rack, whipped around, held it up to my chest, and said, “You need this. I love this for you. Try it on.” As she let the hanger go, I caught it right before it hit the floor, then made my way to the change room. The shirt was hideous. It was a black mesh half-shirt with the number “69” spray-painted on the front in bright red bubble font. I was wearing super-casual pants because I’d come from dinner with the crew before we hooked up, so now I had to pull off pleats with a belly shirt. Not a strong look.
I walked out to do a quick spin in the mirror, dying of embarrassment, but still laughing. I could see pretty much the entire store in the reflection behind me. And Lexi was gone. I was alone. In mesh.
I awkwardly walked over to the guy behind the counter, covering my exposed stomach with both my hands.
“Did you see…” That’s all I managed to get out before he looked up at me and shrugged. He didn’t say anything. He just shrugged. Then he called me a cab.
On any regular day, the Playboy Mansion was just a sad old house full of sad old men. Everyone I met on staff was Hef’s age and just shuffled around trying to look busy. My first day there was what they called an “off day,” which meant no parties, no famous movie night, no naked shenanigans. No bunnies and no booze. But I did get to play with a monkey.
As we wrapped the first half of our interview, which took about ninety minutes, we were invited to have lunch with Hef out back on the patio beside the infamous Grotto. It was taco day! As we were slowly escorted out at a senior’s pace, I took note of every single piece of furniture we passed. Everything was oversized, thick and heavy. Old wood, red velvet, and built for one thing and one thing only. Even the end tables looked strong enough to hold two people—comfortably. We toured the kitchen, which was huge and industrial, like something you’d see in the back of a restaurant. One of the chefs yelled, “Who’s ready for tacos?” as he and a few other people followed us out with trays and trays of food. I’d never had a real California taco before, let alone one handmade by a real Mexican chef, so I was pumped. My dad loved tacos and would always lecture us on what an authentic SoCal taco was supposed to taste like.
It took one bite, without even swallowing, for me to realize I was eating Old El Paso. Hef built his empire on the finer things in life. He had a half-dozen or so staff cook all his meals in a million-dollar kitchen, and there we were eating a store-bought taco kit with iceberg lettuce and pre-grated cheddar. To go along with everything else in that house, this was, hands down, the saddest lunch I’d ever seen. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not above a taco kit—nobody should be, because they’re delicious—but this was the Playboy Mansion, for god’s sake. I wanted to appear appreciative and impressed, though, so I looked at Hef and said, “Man, these are just like the ones we have back home.”
Hef smiled and grunted but said no actual words, while one of his guys chimed in with, “Yup. This is the chef’s special. Hef knows what he likes.” Which tells you just about everything you ever need to know about that place.
I’ve told this story a hundred times over the years, but I always add more boobs.
I never talked to Lexi again, but years later I looked her up. I couldn’t find anything about her, or the company she said she ran, but I did read a story about a woman with her exact same name, who looked exactly like her, who got popped for fraud and identity theft in Florida.
Probably wasn’t her.