Los Angeles has many things going for it. Sunshine. Ceviche. Ab density per square mile. However, brains, feminism, and gender-non-conformity are not among those things.
Three months after graduating with a neuroscience degree I was already certain I’d never use, I moved to Los Angeles for the vague promise of a job in television. The job was as a production assistant on a one-hour family drama on the WB, back when the WB was a network that hosted high-art like “America’s Next Top Model” and “The Jamie Kennedy Experiment.” A production assistant is essentially a peon, a grunt, a mote. A worthless piece of human trash whose existence is only to serve teenage prima donnas and their stage mothers. And make photocopies.
Los Angeles proved a difficult landing place after a near-idyllic Midwestern upbringing. It was a city that attempted to give me an eating disorder under the guise of building me into a stronger person.
To be fair, it wasn’t just that I was working and living in Los Angeles, it was that I was working in Hollywood and living on the Sunset Strip. When I first moved into my apartment, my roommate Jill took me to her bedroom window and pointed down at the sidewalk. She said, “That’s where River died.”
Living across the street from the Viper Room may sound “LA glamorous” except when it takes five hours to get home because the Lakers won or you want to buy some damn tampons and Hägen Dazs but can’t get to the register because eight groupies are fighting over who gets to buy Anthony Kiedis’s cigarettes.
My roommate, Jill, was a total party girl. She loved hitting the clubs up and down the strip every weekend. She dated and/or slept with most of the bartenders, which for me meant free drinks. I hated partying on the Strip, but it was my neighborhood, and I was a broke ass P.A. who liked getting drunk for free.
The hardest part about those first seven months in LA was that I was working a super stressful job that kept me running around fourteen hours a day, and I wasn’t getting laid. I had gone from bountiful queer, pansexual utopia in the middle of Ohio, to dry as a desert in Los Angeles. In LA, the women wouldn’t sleep with me because I was bisexual and therefore a “cocksucker.” The men wouldn’t sleep with me because—well, they would sleep with me, but I thought they were disgusting.
I couldn’t go out for a drink without getting unsolicited advice like “Wear tighter jeans” or “If you want to make it in the industry, you should lose fifteen pounds.” The weirdest part was I wasn’t trying to “make it in the industry.” These guys just saw blond hair and big boobs and naturally assumed that was my goal.
Thus, I didn’t get laid for a long time.
After a while, though, I needed to remedy the situation. The lack of sex was getting to be problematic. I was wound so tight I worried another batch of script rewrites or unsolicited beauty advice might make me snap. So I did what most normal people do when they need to get laid: I lowered my standards.
One Friday night, Jill invites me out. Rather than my usual jeans and a t-shirt, I put on the tightest shirt, shortest skirt, and highest heels I own. We go to a club called Bliss. Rumor is Hugh Hefner is going to be there, and he is, along with his blondtourage. Everyone is trying to get Hugh’s attention, while I’m just trying to get the bartender’s attention.
I have a few drinks to kill the pain in the balls of my feet from those stupid high heels. Then I wait in an interminable line for the bathroom. To this day, I believe that all LA clubs should have two lines for the bathrooms: one for needing to actually pee, and the other for cocaine. It would cut down on everyone’s impatience with the others’ urgent needs.
There is an equally long line for the men’s room (because of cocaine). Across from me is a light-skinned black man with green eyes, full mauve lips, and long, perfect dreadlocks. His legs are likewise crossed.
We start talking, and he’s kind and funny and smart, and I think, I’ve got to lock this down.
Jill finds me and wants to bounce to a new bar that’s catty-corner from our apartment. Perfect. The place is called Red Rock and it’s a “dive bar” in that all the bartenders wear plaid. I’m from Ohio. A dive bar there is where there are peanut shells on the ground and they don’t serve anything in glass in case a fight breaks out. That’s a dive bar, this was an overpriced model hangout with crappy beer. But I guess I’m splitting hairs.
I invite Mr. Beautiful, whose name is John, and he agrees to come with. We enter the bar and start dancing. It’s obviously on. We move together beautifully and have killer chemistry. Eventually the pain in my feet grows unbearable and I decide I want to be on my back. I invite him home with me. He agrees, but first he wants to stop at his hotel. We head down the street to the Mondrian where he and his coworkers are staying. John says he’s a cameraman on a reality show in town for the night. I don’t know if that’s true, and I don’t care. Either way, he had an expense account, so along with his “film crew,” we raid the mini-fridge.
Then someone whips out some cocaine and I try it for the first time. I actually half try it because I don’t know you have to hold your breath as you get close, or else you end up snuffing all of the powder off the table. Happily for me (less so for my new friends) I get just enough cocaine in my system to get horny and ego-emboldened. I decide we need to go home and fuck right. Now.
John and I walk back down the street to my apartment, head to my room, and start tearing at each other. It’s the kind of drunken, cocaine-y sex that’s ravenous and brazen and wild. John is even more beautiful naked. He has an amazing body and a beautiful cock. When he lies back on my pillow, his dreadlocks splay around his head. He looks like a sexy lion, and all I want to do is make him growl.
We have the kind of sex where I don’t know if want to keep my eyes closed because it feels so good or keep my eyes open because it looks so good.
I had an amazing panorama view from my bedroom window of Hollywood, West Hollywood, and Beverly Hills. I’d lie in bed at night just wanting to look at that view while getting fucked from behind and finally, FINALLY it was happening.
The sex goes all night…I think.
The next morning I wake up with my head on my pillow. John is lying opposite me with his head at the foot of the bed. Our legs are intertwined, and our genitals are still lined up. Apparently we’d passed out, simultaneously, while having sex. There’s something I can check off my Bucket list.
I drop John off at his hotel so we can both properly tend our hangovers with Saturday brunch, the way Los Angeles intended.
Monday night, I go out to celebrate a friend’s birthday. We tear it up, as was often the case with that group of guys. I end up on the birthday boy’s couch, since I’m too drunk to drive. As I drift off to sleep, a part of my brain I usually don’t allow to function late at night sounds a tiny alarm. That alarm reminds me that I have the earliest call time of the season the next morning. I have to be at the office at five a.m. I look at my cell phone. It is currently 3:15. I get sick. I throw up. And I fall asleep.
Forty-five minutes later, my actual alarm goes off. I stumble to my feet, chug a glass of water, and drive to the office.
I am greeted at the office by a stack of rewrites waiting on my desk, which I have to copy and collate before the cast and crew show up.
The relationship a P.A. has with their photocopier is like what the Navi in Avatar have with those dragon things. “I see you,” I whisper to the copier. It chirps in response, then chokes on a stack of blue paper and jams in four places to prove its devotion to me.
I remove flakes of toner-caked blue paper while wearing the same outfit I wore the night before: hoodie, heels, and denim miniskirt. The lead teamster, a thick-calved redhead, is the only other crew member on set. He walks past the copy room and eyes me. “If you gotta be hungover,” he says, “you may as well get paid for it.
“I’ll let you know when the hangover starts,” I snarl.
Fifteen hours later, I’m still on set. Our episode director thinks of himself as an auteur, setting up each shot of this terrible family dramedy as though it were a Kubrickian masterpiece to be studied in film classes for generations. We’ve had three rounds of rewrites for no reason. I usually empathize with the struggle for editorial perfection, but I promise, the script of this show did not matter.
All the other P.A.’s had come and gone. I’m
working a double shift, and all I want is to hear the walkie-talkie
screech with the words, “Martini shot.” But instead I hear the
dreaded words, “Rewrites.” I unload a ream of buttercup paper, a sign of how many rewrites we’ve already had. Somewhere after
six other colors and between buttercup and double white is when you
know Los Angeles has you by the short hairs. I eye the box
of white paper, whispering an incantation
that repeats the word “Martini shot.” My Los Angeles life feels
more bleak by the moment. I load up the copier with
buttercup paper. My trembling fingers struggle to reach for a
handful of brads.
I recall a Raymond Pettibon painting that I once saw in a museum with the inscription, “I thought California would be different.” But I didn’t think that. Even though the details were sketchy, I somehow knew it would be just like this: hungover in last night’s miniskirt, flecks of dried vomit in my hoodie, catering to the overinflated egos of people getting paid ten times what I did to recite pointless lines while holding prop surfboards.
I run between the copy room and my office. It’s a long corridor with a lobby in between the two. By now I’ve taken off my shoes (which the assistant director reminds me is against OSHA rules) and I’m half running, half stomping down the hall.
I run to the copier to clear the paper jam and grab the fresh scripts, then stomp them back to my office to collate and brad them together. Then back to the copy room and back to the office.
Halfway from my office on the final trip, I feel something go wrong in my body. My pelvis feels weird, off, bad. I stop in the lobby and hold my abdomen waiting for it to pass, but it doesn’t. Out of instinct, I reach into my skirt, into my underwear, and up into my vagina.
I feel something. I reach deeper and grab it with my fingers. And pull. I’m pulling slowly and it feels like my vagina is turning itself inside out. Oh god, oh god. I pull this whatever out of my vagina. I pull and pull, and finally, dangling between my fingers, is a condom.
I am disgusted and horrified and slightly amused, but mostly horrified. I stand, stunned, staring at this shriveled bit of orange latex. Then I realize, I am standing in the lobby of my office building holding a four-day old condom I just fished out of my cunt.
I run to the bathroom with a rush of adrenaline and rage and whip that sucker into the toilet. I stand over the toilet and see everything that’s wrong with my life in LA—my job, my body image, my sexual identity, my social life—is wrapped up inside that pathetic piece of latex. I decide to make some changes. First, drink less. Second, look for a new job. And third, and most importantly, I’m going to try being a lesbian for a little while.