Scrappy Little Nobody Page 7

  Don’t get me wrong, I wish I had more skills, but if I’d had a safety net, I would have used it. Sometimes the terror was so overwhelming that if I’d been offered an apprenticeship scrubbing the floor of a button factory (what do normal jobs look like?), I would have thought, Fine, I can’t take this anymore—sign me up, give me the health benefits, give me a time card and a mean boss and some goddamn security. I needed the fear. I needed to be forced to rely on myself, and the dream, and sometimes unemployment checks. (Thank you, US government! Please don’t repossess my house when I go all Grey Gardens!)

  It’s obviously very lucky for me that, at the moment, acting is working out. This was not always the case. For a while there, if a casting director looked up from her clipboard, it was a good day. There are buildings in Los Angeles that still make me shudder when I drive past, the aura of rejection radiating off of them like a landfill on a hot day. I sometimes think that I should have a sense of pride knowing that I’ve achieved more than my sixteen-year-old brain would have ever let me imagine, but mostly it’s just the opposite.

  I think self-doubt is healthy. And having to fight for the thing you want doesn’t mean you deserve it any less. Maybe I’m not supposed to mention that it was a fight, but I find that to be such an old-money attitude. I think I’m supposed to act as though I always knew I’d find success (not out loud, obviously—just using some heavy-handed subtext), but moving to Los Angeles felt like that dream where you’re naked in a grocery store, hoping that no one will notice. I figured I’d be discovered and thrown out at some point. I’m still waiting.

  I came to LA without a car. I was unprepared for the move in a lot of ways, and thinking I could walk to a grocery store and back before a carton of milk spoiled was a pretty glaring one. Why didn’t anyone tell me you needed a car in LA? Because I didn’t know a soul who lived there. That was a much greater problem, of course, but one thing at a time!

  Craigslist apparently existed back then, but no one I knew had heard of it, so I found an apartment the old-fashioned way—getting an email, six people removed, about a woman looking for a roommate. I crafted a few paragraphs about what a responsible, tidy, and courteous person I was and sent it to the woman in question. Gwendolyn was in her mid-twenties, and although she was nervous about me being from out of town—she didn’t want to babysit me—I assured her that I was very independent and I wouldn’t rely on her while I got settled. After a couple weeks of correspondence, once all the details had been worked out, I mentioned that I was seventeen—SEEYOUINAFEWDAYSCAN’TWAIT!

  The day I arrived Gwendolyn was cautious but welcoming, and I made sure to do my very best impression of a capable human as proof that I wouldn’t be a burden. That day, I bought the cheapest desk and twin bed that Ikea made. For good measure, I got a couple of those ninety-nine-cent tea-light holders. I was taking Hollywood by storm and doing it in style.

  I’d only ever seen two neighborhoods in Los Angeles, so I didn’t know what a sketchy area I was living in. I ignored the fact that the corner store had bars on the windows and that there were prostitutes outside at all hours. My gruff, disabled neighbor was clearly renting out the abandoned car in the garage to a homeless man, and the woman below me had night terrors, but I had candle holders and I was going to be a goddamn actress.

  I’d been paid a decent amount for a failed TV pilot before I officially moved to LA, but when every cent you make has to last until your hypothetical next job, you don’t get comfortable. I had to stretch that paycheck indefinitely, but alas, I needed a car. I bought a used Toyota and named him Charlie, after Charlie Brown, because he broke down all the time.

  The next pilot season was starting up, which meant I was usually sent on one to four auditions a day. I discovered MapQuest and wrote down directions by hand since I didn’t have a printer. Between that and my growing knowledge of the city, I was only getting lost, like, six times a day. Pilot season is grim because you’re sent in for everything, no matter how wrong you are for it. I kept a mountain of clothes and accessories in my trunk so I could go from the fourteen-year-old goth daughter on a TNT drama to the spoiled twenty-two-year-old receptionist on a workplace comedy. It’s obvious now that splitting my focus made it impossible for me to do well on any of them, but I was in no position to turn down auditions.

  How do I describe my personal life during this time? I met funny, interesting people, I went to art galleries downtown, I performed a one-woman show for free on the street corner. Except none of that’s true. I was alone and freaked out and I stayed in my room a lot. I spent most of my time trying to find ways to occupy myself without spending money or ingesting calories.

  I didn’t have any friends. Well, I didn’t know anyone. Which is the less depressing way to say I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t know how to make friends in LA. Usually when people move to a new city, it’s for school or for work. Unlike my friends who were entering college, I was not surrounded by packs of like-minded young people all equally eager to start new friendships. Unemployment and my lack of a fake ID were conspiring to turn me into a world-class recluse.

  I managed to strike up a conversation with a girl in an audition waiting room once. She mentioned that she didn’t have a ride home. Frankly, she seemed a little annoying, but I was desperate for human company, so I offered to drive her. (Fingers crossed that she’s not crazy!) I immediately imagined telling people how my best friend and I might never have met if her car hadn’t broken down that morning. (Eesh. Fingers crossed that I’m not crazy.) In my car, I tried to play it cool. We made small talk; she said she’d grown up in LA, which made me doubly nervous. Then she rolled down the window, stuck her feet out, lit a cigarette, and changed the radio station. My new best friend was a real entitled bitch. I gave her my number when I dropped her off. She didn’t offer hers in return.

  Some young neighbors invited me to a party they were having. When they collected five dollars from everyone for pizza I nervously told them I didn’t have any cash, but I would pay them back the next day. In the morning, I knocked on their door with my five dollars and they told me that someone had stolen the money. I assumed they suspected me. I’d been the only new person there. Did making a point to give my five dollars make me look more or less guilty? They assured me they didn’t think I’d done it. I never spoke to them again. Does including this story in my book make me look more or less guilty?

  When I was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Camp, I thought I might make friends with my fellow nominees. I also thought my parents would know what the Independent Spirit Awards were, but they’ve never been good at faking enthusiasm, so that phone call was disappointing. Whatever, this was going to be great! I didn’t know how publicists or stylists worked, but I figured if you walked into a store at the Beverly Center mall and talked loudly about how you needed an outfit for a fancy award show, they’d offer you something eventually. That did not happen, but no worries, Anna, you’re substance, not style; just focus on the art. I watched all the films from my category, some of which were not easy to track down. I thought this would facilitate conversation, but it ended up making me look like a superfan. I assumed my fellow emerging artists would have done their research as well. I guess they were busy effortlessly fitting in.

  I tried to keep in touch with my friends from home. People I’d known since childhood were scattered at colleges around the country, but they all seemed to be having the same euphoric experience. I would call them and feel destroyed by loneliness. It was almost comical. Me sitting on my bed (trying not to disturb my adult roommate) as someone told me how amazing everything was and their new friends called out for them in the background. They had the next four years of their lives mapped out for them, and I was pretending I didn’t see a homeless man asleep in the car next to mine.

  I remember hearing somewhere that most people misremember their adolescence as entirely wonderful or (more often) entirely awful, when it was probably some combination of the two. My memory of my e
arly time in LA suffers from this syndrome.

  The first year was tough. I was lonely. I was broke. But things went from soul-crushing to tolerable in one evening. A friend of mine who was passing through LA took pity on me. He invited me to an American Idol viewing party with some of his friends. Most of the people there didn’t know each other, and I bonded with two dudes named Peter and Alex over our shared outrage when Jennifer Hudson was kicked off. We started hanging out almost nonstop. After a few weeks, Peter and Alex mentioned that they both happened to be apartment hunting. I awkwardly said, “Can I come, too?” I think they were more than happy to have a girl around to make it clear that they were not dating. (They were gay—in case the indignation over J. Hud’s dismissal from Idol didn’t tip you off—they just weren’t dating each other.)

  I told Gwendolyn via email and with minimal notice that I would be moving out. You know, like a coward! At that point I’d already been unmasked as a nonresponsible, nontidy, noncourteous person, so what did I have to lose? I disassembled my desk and bed and reassembled them in a three-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood. That moving day was glorious. I was eighteen and living with two dudes in an apartment with new carpet. I took the smallest bedroom, so I could pay fifty dollars less a month. The fact that it had only one, very small window gave the room a minimum-security-prison vibe, but we made a group trip to Ikea and this time I bought the second-cheapest dresser they made to class the place up.

  The first week we lived there, Alex and I woke up to find tar tracked across the living room carpet. Peter had drunkenly stepped through a construction site, and wouldn’t you know it—tar does not come out of carpet. Ever. I was pissed at Peter, but he was so lovable he got away with everything. It made the whole place look dingy and I had to nervously explain it away when I had anyone over. But we decided we’d rather lose the security deposit than pay to recarpet, so I attempted to hide the stain with an area rug. That decision essentially doomed the apartment to remain in its squalid state. But we figured we’d probably move in a year or so.

  Alex and I were both under twenty-one, but Peter was of age and graciously bought alcohol for us. To save money on décor we exclusively drank Skyy vodka and artfully arranged the empty blue bottles in our living room. I hate day drinking now, possibly because it reminds me of this period. I think we drank just to feel like we were doing something.

  For the most part, we had fun. We went to drag night at Micky’s and someone dressed as my character from Camp, which made me feel more like a superstar than I ever have since. We got stoned and watched scary movies. I smoked too much the night we watched The Amityville Horror and climbed up the back of the couch begging the boys to stop reading my thoughts. It wasn’t a great look, but this was the stuff that distracted me from the overwhelming uncertainty of my professional life.

  A friend who worked at a catering company would occasionally need a temp last minute, pay me cash under the table, and let me have all the tuna Niçoise I could eat. But most of the time I was praying that Law & Order would need a mousy little teen killer so I could keep paying my car insurance.

  Because Peter had lived in LA the longest and was old enough to go out at night, Alex and I became close, at first out of convenience and then out of genuine shared love of making fun of everything and everyone, most of all each other. We watched pop concerts on DVD. We tried to take edgy photographs of each other on my three-megapixel camera. We discovered the “casual encounters” section of Craigslist and, naturally, posted an erotic plea to meet up in the bushes at the end of our street. We waited outside until two guys showed up and walked off together. We were like the creepy cupids of anonymous sex.

  Brazen little beasts that we were, Alex and I were not satisfied with just drinking in our apartment. We wanted to drink with the rest of the world! At that time, clubs were the pinnacle of Los Angeles nightlife. Maybe they still are and I’m just out of touch. Unlike bars, these clubs were large and open and played their music at horrifying volumes. I didn’t know what went on in them, but I wanted to find out.

  Alex knew a mysterious figure named Carlos who seemed to treat “going out” with the same urgency and focus as a mission from Homeland Security. The more I learned about LA nightlife, the more it seemed like a full-time job. Any decent subculture can sell you the promise that reaching the top of its hierarchy means you’ve accomplished something. Clubbing was no different. You went to the right club on the right night, which is to say you only went to the hardest clubs to get into, on the very hardest nights to get in. You spent all day primping and pregaming and all evening enjoying the fruits of your labor.

  One night, Carlos asked us to meet him at Element, a name that inspired some reverence from Alex and, consequently, from me. We had to get in. We nervously explained to Carlos that while Alex had a fake ID, I did not. Carlos wasn’t worried. He told us to come anyway. I assumed he was going to sneak us through some back exit, but when we arrived he walked straight toward the bouncer. Barely breaking his stride, Carlos said, “She’s Ashley’s best friend,” and kept walking, dragging us behind him.

  “Who’s Ashley?” I asked.

  “Ashley Olsen. I told the owner she was coming by tonight. She’s not.”

  I was not twenty-one and neither was Ashley Olsen, yet her name had gotten a stranger through the door of a nightclub without question. The mention of fame in any form, even underage fame, cloaked me from suspicion. Personally, I was thrilled to hear the promise of her attendance was a ruse—I imagine if Miss Olsen had arrived I would have been thrown at her feet like the peasant I am and dragged out of the club.

  The inside looked like a minimalist parody of itself. It was just a dark, empty space with black boxes laid out in different formations, serving as tables or chairs. The music was blaring.

  “Why isn’t anyone dancing?” I shouted.

  If this had been the TV version of my life, a character would have explained that you don’t dance, you just stand around looking cool. Unfortunately, people don’t explain things like that in real life—they want you to shut up and blend in until you figure it out. Luckily for Carlos, the music was SO loud that he could reasonably pretend he hadn’t understood me and trot away toward someone more interesting. Alex and I were left standing by ourselves. He seemed to immediately understand that we’d stumbled into some inner circle and playing along was the name of the game. I continued shouting.

  “I don’t get it; there’s all this space, the music is too loud to have a conversation, but we’re not supposed to dance? Are you just supposed to stand around looking at each other?” Alex was trying to telepathically communicate, Yes, asshole, you are. Okay?

  I kept going. “Do they have to keep the music this loud because no one in Los Angeles has anything to say to each other?” I thought constantly making fun of LA made me look smart. Alex ignored me and eventually I got the message that if I was so annoyed by the situation, I was free to leave. Sadly, the truth was that I was equally under the spell of the nightlife mythos. It didn’t matter if you weren’t having fun; you pretended that you were and bragged about it later. I wanted to do the bragging bit, so I shut my mouth and stayed.

  For a while Alex and I engaged with the nightclub culture as frequently as we could. My interest in getting into these clubs didn’t last long. (It would vanish completely after my twenty-first birthday because, like guys who play hard to get, or Tickle Me Elmo, or your first period, sometimes you only want a thing until you have it.) But at nineteen I did spend a short and regrettable period in a classic trap: trying to fit into something I hated, just to prove to myself that I could.

  Once I realized (to my great relief) that Hollywood Party Girl was something I was not destined to be, I found increasingly joyous ways to spend my time.

  Instead of privately obsessing over them, I forced Peter to help me rehearse audition scenes. The terrible roles were far more fun (and more frequent) than the good ones. The horror scenes were especially good fodder, and we’d en
d up screaming bloody murder and chasing each other around the apartment. It’s weird that I never got those roles.

  When some of my California-native friends heard I’d never been to Disneyland, they insisted on taking me that very moment, even though it was pissing rain. We ran around the park soaking wet but almost completely alone. I started teaching myself to bake, I went to an unreasonable number of costume parties—why did my friends throw so many costume parties? I rediscovered my favorite things—long walks and great movies—and eventually the darkness and power that I’d projected onto the city started to dissipate. I hadn’t booked a job or improved my financial situation, but I was going to be okay. Then a funny thing happened.

  I started getting calls from the same friends from my hometown, the ones who’d been adapting so well to college, now in the first months of their sophomore year. Back at school again, they were no longer overwhelmed by newness or possibility. They had gone back to the same place, and the same friends—some of whom they had made hastily—and now they were lost. It was fine to be a freshman who hadn’t declared a major, but now they had no idea what they wanted to do with their lives or what kind of person they wanted to be, and they were feeling the pressure to decide fast.

  The role reversal was uncanny. I hadn’t even booked a job yet, but somehow we’d switched places. I was convinced that I was on the right path, and they were riddled with uncertainty. I’d only been looking at the drawbacks of my situation; my single-mindedness meant that I had no backup plan, and I worried that if I failed, I’d be unhappy doing anything else. But now I saw this as a blessing. I knew what I wanted. I’d never considered how scared I would be if I didn’t.

  That year Felicity Huffman won an award for her work in Transamerica and said something in her acceptance speech that I held on to for years. “The second time I didn’t work for a year, I gave up any dream that looked like this.” It knocked me sideways. This undeniably talented woman went years without getting a job, not because she wasn’t good, but because sometimes you just have to pass an endurance test. I worried that luck and timing and opportunity (and my little frame and goofy face) might never align at the right moments, but for all the inexorable insecurities that live inside my head, I knew what I was capable of. I just had to be patient.