D-Girl Diary

January 25, 2012

2012-01-25T22:03:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1. Become athletic.

2. Learn to paddleboard.

3. Have sex with someone, anyone.

Nobody ever talks about the bliss of falling out of love. It is an unbelievably freeing feeling, finally, as the stranglehold of worship and longing eases up ever so slightly. But this euphoria of getting over someone is rarely glorified in poetry or song: the poet describes the ache of a broken heart rather than the happiness one feels when one’s heart is set free. I am currently experiencing such joy, as I quietly slide out of the grip of a six year semi-romance with a half-boyfriend. I suppose he was my boyfriend for more than half of that time, but he was always only partly there, with one foot out the door and his eyes peeled for a prettier, younger girl – someone with financial stability, I suppose, and without a penchant for half-truths. So here I stand, on the precipice of things to come. I will now go back to longing for unspecified companionship. I have found that it hurts less to wish for more general things.

When I was in high school I wanted to be an actress. I had no talent, was only moderately cute, and my voice went up about ten octaves when I acted. Nevertheless, I was somehow given the chance to star in a production of Crimes of the Heart. One of the girls from the play died a few years ago, and I believe the last remaining VHS copy of the tape of that performance died with her, thankfully. I eventually gave up my dreams of stardom for the less glamorous world of backstage, and fell in love with the idea of becoming a Director. I liked the idea of being the only female in a male driven world, and I was happy to hand the job of starlet over to the likes of Michelle Pukey, who had an angelic face and the personality of a soggy magazine. It has been a few decades since high school, and next week I will finally be given my shot at the spotlight as I star in an episode of reality television posing as a customer of an illicit website. Aside from the fact that my mother would disown me if she ever found out about it, I can’t see how this brief foray into playacting will harm me. It seems to actually be a natural progression of things, as I spent most of my last relationship making things up, and my younger self spent a brief time dabbling in the seedy world of sexual perversions. It feels fitting that I should wrap up my life of sin with a national television show devoted to my fabricated wonton ways. And then I shall move on, from unrequited love and life’s rotten underbelly and emerge a new person, less interesting to be sure, but wholesome and pure as I enter the next chapter of my soon-to-be boring life.

Apart from my upcoming television debut and the demise of my long-dead relationship, life has been quiet for me. I have spent the last year and a half hiding out in a sleepy beach town like Salman Rushdie in the 90’s. The sound of a ringing phone began to startle me as I morphed from socialite to shut-in, and I think my new look now becomes me – I have not worn lip gloss in 17 months and I own two pair of Uggs, the brown snakeskin ones being the only vestige of the days of my fashionable past. I have written many apologetic emails to ex-friends, and hung on to my ex-boyfriend for dear life, my past patterns doomed to repeat as I once again found myself in a platonic relationship that lasted exactly two years longer than it should have. So I used my ill-gotten reality show earnings to re-carpet my apartment and vowed that the day after the Super Bowl I will stop hanging out with my non-boyfriend. A fitting date for a new beginning, actually, because the new carpet means no more stain in the middle of my living room from puking my guts out after last year’s drunken Super Bowl festivities. I have begun to write again, pages of a screenplay that might only make me laugh, and this silly diary which began years ago as a chronicle of my days as a Hollywood Development Girl, or, maybe not of MY days, but those of a burnt-out slightly amoral version of me, and I stopped abruptly when I realized this girl had become me, or I had become her, and I needed to regroup. All good writing happens in the editing, I have heard, and perhaps this is the way for good living too. So I have edited out, slowly, the most interesting parts of my life, and maybe out of sheer boredom brilliance will emerge, or, at least, some good.

I have not been completely quiet out here at the beach, there were a few sightings of the old d-girl, as I attempted to stalk a boy I kept seeing at the park, but that ended too when I almost side-swiped his car and simultaneously realized he was not at all cute, rather just nearby. My life has not been without drama, either, I am sad to report, as I have had a falling out with yet another sister, and I lost my appendix along the way, which apparently we do not need, but I have the tiny scars on my stomach to forever remind me of its once superfluous presence. So, scarred and sister-less, I sit on my new carpet trying to write a scintillating column about a frankly un-scintillating life, and I have to resist the temptation to stir up trouble just so I have something to write about. My heart still aches from the death of the love of my life, and I can only open my laptop again, at long last, because the urge to write about him has subsided, and besides, he will be memorialized on the reality show next week as I used his death as an excuse to frequent the website of ill-repute.

Nine years ago I was living in New York City, and I decided to make my yearly pilgrimage to Los Angeles: I never called it a move, I would just come for a few months here and there, and then run back to my boyfriend in New York when I had pissed through enough friendships out here with my big mouth and self-destructive nature. That summer I discovered cocaine, and I can thankfully say this phase only lasted four months and I have barely done any drugs since then. I did, however, pick up a liking of Ambien during that time, and have been on it ever since. That is one of the perks of having a degenerative disease of the nervous system: they will give me any drugs I want. Ambien is yet another old friend I have recently left behind, finally, and although I spend many nights staring up at my ceiling fan, it feels good to be substance and poisonous friend- free at long last.

So what kind of diary will this be, you might be wondering, if I am not on drugs, I don’t work in Hollywood anymore, and I am free of relationship and friendship drama? I have no idea is my answer. All I can say is, there is a lot of empty space here now, and plenty of room for things to happen. Big things: a book, a television series, a movie, who knows… I might even have sex eventually, and all of my potential suitors out there will be frightened to hear I just might write about it.

All of this housecleaning is not to say I don’t miss my old way of life. I miss Ambien, and the Sarah’s, and wallowing in the victimhood of the disenfranchised pseudo-girlfriend. I miss having sex, and I miss someone loving me enough to yell at me. I miss Hollywood, but not my ex-boss who fired me the day I got diagnosed with M.S. Come to think of it, I don’t miss eating pickles wrapped in American cheese in the middle of the night on Ambien, and the Sarah’s hate my guts, and I am still in full non-relationship wallow until after the Super Bowl. I don’t miss condoms and drinks with short agents who are trying to sleep with me, and I am still mad that the guy who looked like an Alien told me he was going surfing the day after we slept together and he would call me when he got home and to this day, years later, has yet to call me. So maybe in losing everything I simply got rid of everything bad, and all that is left is a bright and airy beach apartment with new carpeting and all the room in the world for better things to happen to me. It is possible this column will no longer be the bitter musings of a burnt out Development Girl, but rather the exultations of a Regular Girl who just keeps having strange and wonderful things happen to her every day.

You never know. It could happen.

March 3, 2011

2011-03-03T09:00:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1. Hire a police escort, preferably a cute one.
2. Change identity, move to Paris.
3. Stay home on St. Patrick’s Day. Nothing good comes of these Holidays.

My Dead Ex-Boyfriend would not want me to write about shit. He would not want me to write about a dumb crush I have on a guy whose dogs I have spoken to once, and he would not want me to belabor the point in a morbid fashion that I miss him. He knows I miss him, I tell him this when he comes to me in every single one of my dreams. He would want me to write about real shit, but some things are hard to write about because I am always culpable, and I am never just a victim, and the Dead-Ex would mitigate this, by telling me I did not bring this on myself. However, in this instance, the story I am about to tell is all me, I did this, and it was a mistake, and for this, they will likely find my mutilated body washed up in the Playa Inlet: I let back into my life my ex-Boss, the one who sexually harassed me. He is British, and he is brilliant, and he taught me how to write notes on scripts, but he is also crazy and he thinks he has been in love with me for years, even though when we met he was dating a very powerful Development Girl. At the time, I was new to Hollywood, two years older than him, but an assistant nonetheless, and I resisted his advances, although the friends of his girlfriend would contend differently. West Coast Sarah and I would go out with him on occasion, and he would overtly lust after me, but I spent my high school years escaping the advances of men to the point the boys would write “frigid” on my locker, so I was adept at avoiding the cagey Brit, and I let Sarah spy on my tracking website as a thank you for taking care that I was not raped by my new boss.

It has been a few years. I have moved back and forth across the country twice, and somehow, miraculously, kept in touch with the British, surly man who had professed his love for me when I was a lowly assistant at his company, to the peril of both of our jobs. I moved on, and so did he and somehow, we stayed friends. But not the kind of friends you have in real life, just Hollywood friends having lunch every few years and talking about sleeping together but wisely, not. A few years ago I had just such a lunch with him, and he was getting married. He still expressed interest in me, and that was the last I heard from him save for one email stating that he had sold a huge screenplay with a big Star attached, the same Big Star for whom I catered a New Year’s Eve party when I was still poor and struggling. A few months ago, I got a call from the brooding Brit, in the middle of the night, his voice foggy, he misses me, wants to see me…. The next day I emailed him innocently, sure lets have lunch, and he sent back a picture of a lovely little one year old baby. Apparently, however, his marriage was ending, and he said I am the girl of his dreams. I have been through this before, men loving the girl I used to be but not the girl I am now. My history with these guys, any guys other than my Dead Ex, is pathetically small, but I agree to a lunch because I respect the Brit’s standing in our fucked up little community, and the lunch started with nice pasta and ended with him chasing me around a coffee table at his house. Somehow I managed to escape unscathed but the damage had been done, he loves me now, real love, even though I am a new person, I am no longer fabulous or successful or fast-moving, and his obsession grows anyway. I don’t see him for months afterwards, but I bask in the glow of feeling pretty enough to be stalked, and then finally I agree to go out with him for Valentine’s Day.

I am not justifying this decision. It was a bad decision. This man is nuts, he is a documented stalker, there were letters written at my old job from the President of our company, and from the Brit as mandated by the company, a therapist was hired for him, and apologies were made. I got another job and nobody sued anyone, situation averted… yet now, as one of a series of bad decisions clouded by the death of my Ex, I have agreed to go on a real date with him. I have no idea how I thought this would play out in any way other than weird, and destructive. There were lots of warning signs leading up to this date that I should have been aware of: he would get angry at me every other day for not seeing him since our lunch, for not “liking” his Facebook posts, for not changing my status (is there a Facebook status that states: being stalked? I was not aware). But now we have plans for Valentine’s Day, and I have nobody to tell me how asinine this is, so I went.

For the big date, I dressed in my floppiest fashionable sweater, knowing he wanted to see my boobs so purposely hiding them, and didn’t even shower. I drove myself so I would have a getaway and when I arrived it was shockingly banal. He had bought me a nice designer bracelet, expensive chocolates and had secured us a table at a very posh restaurant surely booked well in advance for this day. During dinner he was nothing but cordial and witty, and we talked about Development Days, and I felt like I was having dinner with an old friend. We went back to his place, which was next to the restaurant, and watched Jeopardy, and he let me go home, not even a lap around the coffee table for old time’s sakes. I left optimistic. Maybe he had changed. Maybe we could date and get to know each other like normal people. But I was wrong. Nobody normal wants to date me, it seems. The calls started coming in the next day, one after another, he was angry with me, even after a heartfelt thank you from me for his uncharacteristic show of restraint the night before. But he wanted more. At first he just wanted to be recognized as my boyfriend (as if anyone else cares) but then he just kept calling and emailing and texting over and over. I finally told him it wasn’t going to work out between us, this crazy kind of passion was flattering the hell out of me, but I am not frigid, or a lesbian as he quickly accused, I am simply scared of insane people being one myself. For some reason this enraged him, and he lost it completely. I am hesitant to write what happened next lest I embarrass him and lest he decides to bludgeon me to death, but I suppose it has gone beyond that already. It is possible my Ex-Boss will come to my little Beach Apartment and murder me, and it will be my fault. Who goes out on a date with her Ex-Boss who used to sexually harass her? I deserve to die.

So the moody Brit who used to make interns cry and who inspired hatred amongst his peers at my old company because of his biting criticisms and sullen ways, has been rejected by me for once and for all, and now the barrage of horrible emails, texts, and phone calls begin. I had no idea what was in store for me. Emails of such vitriol I have not heard since Sarah days: I am an old cripple who writes a lame blog, I am an ex-whore who caused her own MS, I need a cane – oh and, here is a website for canes, which I will apparently need just about when men stop looking at me, and I am a gold digger who only liked him when I thought he had money… According to this man who has pledged his love for me for years to anyone who would listen, I am now a lesbian loser and all alone in the world. Oh he had some valid points, he is a smart guy, as he points out: he placed second in his entrance exam at Oxford. He is smart and mean, and his barbs hurt. He has decided I caused my own MS due to my whoring days in my twenties, which would not be so far off base, except I was not actually a whore in my twenties, not for lack of trying but the hand job house I was planning on joining got busted by the police the day the Madam was taking me to Hollywood Boulevard to pick me out a new wardrobe. The Brit has been keeping close track of my stories, however, and did not leave a stone unturned: my blog is morbid, get over the Dead Ex already, my family is embarrassed of me, my sister hates me, he was careful to eviscerate me on every level, and then, after a night of a hundred emails, he sends me a kiss and says I can make it all go away if I just change my relationship status on Facebook.

I am single, it’s true, but I am not such a pathetic loser that I will be intimidated into dating someone. I did want the abuse to stop, but blocking him from my phone and email seemed easier than entering into a relationship with a certified nut job. I can take the abuse, I grew up berated, but I am sad to lose a friend that has been so hard to keep over the years. And an intelligent friend, albeit troubled. I should have handled this differently, not gone over to his house, not gone out with him for Valentine’s Day, but I wanted to go on a date because I can’t remember the last date I have been on, and I will admit to enjoying attention from Hollywood’s most hated ex-executive. I suppose I was just amazed that anyone wanted to date me at all, and the fact that it was someone who had been formally reprimanded in the past for liking me made it all even more enticing. In the end, however, I treated him unfairly, strung him along just like the Editor of our School Newspaper in High School who put signs on my locker asking me to the Prom – it was back when Moonlighting was on the air, and he cut out pictures of Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepard and put them on my locker with little balloons coming out of their mouths begging me to say yes, and I waited a full month to answer him because I was afraid of men back then, and I guess maybe I still am.

So now my phone is once again quiet, no drunken messages from a pissed off Brit, no late night chats with my now Dead-Ex, and no date for next Valentine’s Day, although I have plenty of time to dredge up old skeletons from my closet if things get too boring. I should probably be a little more scared about the sleeping Giant from England who is awake and extremely angry, but I am not sure I would mind if he came to my house and hit me over the head with my own laptop or something, at least I would get more readers for my blog, and if there is a Heaven I can just go hang out with my Dead Ex, who is surely bent over a magazine at some seedy Celestial bar. It would be so nice to see him.

February 18, 2011

2011-02-18T15:17:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1. Hire a Publicist
2. Get a Makeover and free up time for the Book Tour.
3. Prepare for the Onslaught of Fame.

Because I grew up eating no processed foods, only able to eat food from our garden or slaughtered animals, I always thought the machines that dispensed things like turkey or ham sandwiches were the best invention known to mankind. I wanted one of those stale, pinkish treats that did not exist in nature because, frankly, I was tired of nature. Living on 220 acres of nothing but trees and a cross-country ski path that led from Massachusetts to New Hampshire, there was no shortage of God’s creations around: five or six dogs, a few cats (if they did not crawl into our car’s engine to keep warm and burn to death when my Mom turned the car on), twenty-one chickens, two horses and two ponies (very stubborn, one with a hematoma), a black sheep, three pigs named ham, bacon and sausage, a cow named Bubba (who once went to the bathroom all over the inside of my Step-Father’s Land Cruiser) and, for two weeks, a cockatoo named Jose Feliciano that got eaten by our old cat Tiger. We had a huge garden, and grew things like rhubarb for pies, and zucchini, of which there was a seemingly endless supply, and for dessert we would pick wild berries and, if we were really lucky my Mom would whip some fresh cream she would skim off of fresh cow’s milk to top them off. When I ran away from home to go live with my Dad in Ohio at the age of sixteen, I wanted nothing to do with nature, or anything healthy or fresh – I was still scarred from my Mom’s health food kick in the seventies that included dinners like refried tofu and carob cakes on our birthdays. Columbus, Ohio, the fast-food capital of the world, was the perfect place for me, and when I called my Mom to tell her I had left camp a day early to fly to Ohio to live in a town house with my Dad, I am pretty sure her gasp of shock was because she did not want her offspring living in any structure built after the 1800’s.

I wasn’t able to escape God’s Creatures forever though, because when I was in college my boyfriend and I inherited two tiny Boxer puppies after his Dad died of lung cancer, and suddenly we were living in an illegal sublet in Stuyvesant Town on the lower East Side of Manhattan with two dogs, something frowned upon severely by the Stuyvesant Town Gestapo, who had already banged down our door on several occasions to try and evict us, foiled only by my insistence that I was not in fact living there, but just the maid and that the tenant would, always, be home shortly. I was only 20 years old, and I did not want dogs. I didn’t want dog hair on my Marc Jacobs silk sweaters, but I loved my boyfriend, so we moved to an apartment that allowed animals, a little dump in Hell’s Kitchen with a patio, and soon those little puppies turned into eighty pound dogs that took up more room in our little full size bed than me, and I spent years in bed with my boyfriend and two dogs, curled up in a little corner with my feet hanging off so those dogs, who were brothers and best friends, could be comfortable.

One night, fourteen years later, I was out with my cousin, and I came home a little drunk and very tired, and as I kicked off my heels I saw that one of the dogs had died on the floor of our apartment. I called my boyfriend and he left his bartending job and came home and wrapped the dog in a blanket and took him to an animal hospital where they could properly dispose of him. The other dog stood patiently at our apartment door waiting for his brother to come home for three months. Once in a while he would let out a small whimper, but mostly he was just quietly waiting as he had no knowledge of death, so for him, it was just a matter of time before his brother came bounding through the doorway. We got a cabin in Vermont that summer because I had a book deal and wanted to finish my novel, and the surviving dog got to go with me. We thought he would love the open fields and refreshing little lake, but he had lost the use of his back legs by then, and he waited at the cabin door for his brother just like he had waited for him back in New York. A few months later, he died. I feel like that dog sometimes, as the bright sun shines through my balcony window and I can smell the ocean air on a quiet Sunday at the beach. Now that my Ex-Boyfriend has died, I don’t want to go run through the fields or jump off the dock into the cool lake water. I just want my best friend to come home.

Unlike my dear departed dog, unfortunately, I am smart enough to know my ex is not coming home, although he visits my dreams almost every night. It’s weird to be haunted by him in this way, because in real life he was never the type to hang around, I was always the hanger, I am quite sure I have been the source of many a nightmare for him over the years. I guess this is the Universe paying me back. In an attempt to regain my sanity, as apparently I am still here, I sent my ex-friend the East Coast Sarah a message in case she, like my old dog, is somehow waiting for me to walk through her front door and all these years our signals just got crossed. She has not written me back, not this time or the other ten times I have contacted her since she abruptly severed our ties a few years ago. It’s funny I should choose East Coast Sarah to fixate on right now as I think about past pets , because I remember the time she decided she had had enough of her fluffy white cat Audrey and she let her right out her front door in the middle of New York City. My Dead Ex did not like East Coast Sarah, he was much more a fan of West Coast Sarah, which makes sense because West Coast Sarah was a good person, and East Coast Sarah was not. There were lots of people in my life that my Dead Ex did not like, including the Angry Indian, but I don’t hold grudges like that, my life does not exist in such rigid circles of virtue. I wish I could hold a grudge, savor a little resentment, it might make life a little easier and might stop me from sending embarrassing messages to ex-friends that will never get returned.

As much as I would like to just sit and think about my past, stalk ex-friends, and obsess over Dead Ex-Boyfriends, life for me is starting to creep forward, ever-so-slightly, and I am excited to start compiling a list of new things to regret in the future. I have finished the revision of my novel, which I sold a few years back and then turned in just as my Editor got fired for publishing a book that was basically a justification for murder, the OJ Simpson Book. I could have found a new Editor back then, I suppose, but I am a head case, plain and simple and well-documented by three states, so I sat on a stack of pages for a few years, and now it seems some of my references are dated. I spent the last few months, when I was not plagued by terrorizing nightmares featuring one Dead Ex, updating locations and rounding out my story, which has played out in real life just as it should in a novel: I grew into a better person, things ended and new things began, and the central theme of moral uncertainty was reinforced and then resolved. I should not say yet how things turn out, but I am satisfied that above all else, I got what was coming to me.

Life after finishing my book is requiring a bit of an adjustment. Although my heroine’s life ends, for the time being, wrapped in a tidy bundle, I always thought my real life would ultimately be a love story, because I have spent most of my adult life in some sort state of tortured love, but I find myself single and not even interested in one evening with a member of the opposite sex. My conversation with the Beach Guy revolved mostly around his dogs, and we parted knowing little more about each other than our proclivity for larger animals as opposed to the little yappy dogs seen peeking out of ladies’ purses on Rodeo Drive. I am not sure who I am outside of innocent flirting, manic bouts of random sex, and years of deep and desperate, soul-melding love. Everything for me seems to have changed so drastically I am having a hard time recognizing myself at all. My apartment is clean and spacious, a vast change from the cramped, smoke-filled, dog hair laden, sunless pit I lived in in New York. My phone barely rings anymore, a far cry from the forty phone calls a day I would get from my now Dead Ex. I have finished a novel, again, but this time it is less a jumble of self-conscious journal entries and more a real book that can be purchased in a store. My life is more legitimate, and this grounded, solitary existence free from psychosis and mania seems more suited for the trappings of my old life: a serious boyfriend, a couple of high-maintenance dogs, a real career, but somehow I have none of these things. There is a lot of empty space right now and I am curious to see what will fill that space – will my book be a best-seller and high-rated television show? Will my next love be someone who appreciates my crazy family and who convinces me to love animals again? It’s a barn-burner, and I am not going to give away the ending but I have a feeling things are going to start to get a lot more exciting around here.

February 10, 2011

2011-02-10T15:20:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1. Replace WGA Screeners with Elmo DVD's.
2. Use the back of old scripts as coloring paper.
3. Teach the kid to read on old buck slips.

It’s been six and a half months since the love of my life died, and it feels like a minute has gone by, time has stood still for me, my worst nightmare has come true, the ultimate abandonment, but somehow I get out of bed in the morning, brush my teeth, and sigh myself through each day. I have always felt lonely and sad, and no matter how many people surround me, there has been a slight panic and tightness in my chest even as I say a breezy goodbye to a lunch date. Now, the universe mocks me, as if to say: “This is real loss, this is despair, this is what it feels like to be alone and the rest of your life has been an overreaction: now is the true meaning of sad….” My worst self feels a small sense of relief, as horrible as that sounds, because my moral compass is gone, and nobody is checking up on me as I have random, meaningless sex and do other things normally reserved for college years, and I don’t have to explain myself to that caring soul on the East Coast. I have done some things my Dead Ex would have been proud of since he died, I begrudgingly admit, such as spending countless hours revising my novel that has been paid for and never published, and I am skinny as a rail and my gaunt face is finally finding its crooked balance, but mostly I have spent the last half of a year flailing around helplessly, making mistakes and hoping against all hope that there is no afterlife or any way for him to witness my downward spiral from under the snap pea leaf or through the eyes of a baby robin.

As much as I want to just squander away the rest of my days in the soothing embrace of victimhood, or the haze of wine and prescription medication, I cannot because, alas, there is a guy. A really cute guy with blondish curly hair and blue sweatpants with two red stripes running down the sides who walks his two biggish dogs on the beach every morning and every early evening, and not knowing him at all, save for a friendly wave every day, seems to be reason enough to blow dry my hair and change out of my Dead Ex’s double XL wool sweater every so often into a small tee shirt that shows off the new tiny waist I have acquired from the Grief Diet. This guy, who I have seen every day since I moved to the beach last May, and who, for all I know, could be married, gay or boring, is my reason for living right now. I refuse to talk to this guy because I find happiness in not knowing anything about him, just as I find some solace in the fact that I have no idea where my Dead Ex is right now. Hopefully my Dead Ex is languishing between some tall stacks of rare books somewhere, and the Beach Guy is single and has a penchant for skinny girls with sunken eyes who haven’t slept for months. For now, I am happy to leave these questions unanswered.

I don’t remember much of the Super Bowl this year. As part of the grim pact I've made with myself, I continued my pattern of self-destruction on that day by getting blind drunk and throwing up all over my shabby grey beach carpeting. I don’t know how long I can sustain this dedication to blatant misbehavior, however, because I’m not stuck in some shitty marriage, Multiple Sclerosis has not yet put me in a wheelchair, and I am not currently so sickly in love I can’t breathe without the presence of another person. Try as I might to create chaos around me so that I can fill the space left by my Dead Ex with the clamor of false emergencies, things at the beach are quiet right now. My Non-Boyfriend is now officially just an Ex, after being my boyfriend for an unimpressive amount of time: my second official Ex-Boyfriend ever, and the only one who is still alive. I wish I could say I left that situation reasonably and with behavior appropriate to my age, but I was just left, one day, at long last, for good, and six and a half months ago that would have left me crippled with remorse, but now, comparatively, it seems silly to even cry about. He is not dead. He simply chose to be without me, opted out of my vise-like psychic stranglehold and he now lives in a chic bachelor pad far from the beach and all of my hysterics. I don’t blame him. I would leave me too, with a nice little note telling me what a sweet girl I am and how I will miss my cooking and going to the movies on Saturdays. And then I would check up on me once or twice a year in between ski trips and happy hour chicken wings. It was nice having someone around for a while, and I will miss him, but I am not sure romance between two people should feel so similar to the relationship between a Prison Warden and a Prisoner. My Ex-Non-Boyfriend is free from jail, his penance completed, his debt to society paid. I hope for his sake that he never looks back.

My job as a writer’s assistant has also become a casualty of the tumult of the past half year. My complete lack of tact and the ability to navigate office politics came to a boiling point at the Holidays when, emboldened by my new feeling of independence, and fueled by the need for extra income caused by such grief purchases as a new-ish car, I asked for a raise via email and in a haughty tone, and my boss promptly fired me. And then, the strangest thing happened. My family, which has been the subject of reams and reams of pages written by me of stories of neglect and abandonment, suddenly came through for me. There were emails sent around, even between my parents who have not spoken in years, expressions of concern and offers of help, and money was sent and gratefully received by me, and I was able to keep my beach apartment without the help of my always generous but now Dead Ex, and I am left with little to complain about. I have a new job as a Nanny to a little boy just down the street, a few friends who hung in there through the maelstrom, and more emotional freedom than I have had in decades. I am not giving up on Development, or being a D-Girl, I couldn’t if I wanted to as it is now part of my DNA, and I still write notes for people on the side, read scripts, and help set up projects for friends. One does not leave Development forever, it seems, but it's a burn-out career, and I will be the first to admit that right now, I just can't hack it.

I'm sure I will go back to the Hollywood machine at some point, but I need a break, I need to lie down and take a small nap like the toddler now entrusted to my care, because my heart is broken and my head is tired, and I don’t have the energy to care about movies that may or may not ever get made or scripts that need stronger second acts. I can't stomach one more drinks with a horny agent, or one more breakfast with a hungry intern. I need peace, which apparently, right now, comes for me in the unlikely form of an unruly two year old. I have no idea why I chose this job, which seems so far removed from the glamorous world of movie-making that took me so many years to master, but maybe it’s because I wanted something, anything, new in my life. I was looking for something that wasn’t going to die or choose skiing over me, or that I wasn’t going to lose because of a self-entitled email. I just wanted to spend my days, for a little while, with someone who is starting fresh, who holds my hand with feverish optimism and maybe some of that newness will rub off on me and I can start all over again: a smart, well-spoken girl who is good at studio notes and finding viable projects and who won’t crumble from a sideways look.

As I'm walking home from my new job today, the sunset along the water is unspeakably pretty and I feel guilty admiring it knowing that my Ex will never again see those particular hues. I think about all the kids graduating soon from USC and UCLA who would kill to have reached executive level in the world of Development, and all the writers who would do anything for a book deal with one of the top publishers in the country, and I am overwhelmed with an unexpected feeling of hopefulness and gratitude. As I turn the corner to head up the hill towards my apartment, I see the Beach Guy taking his usual route towards the ocean with his two dogs and I take a deep breath, cross the street, give him my signature crooked smile and, for the first time, I lean over and stop to pet one of his dogs. He smiles back and pets the other dog with a ring-less hand and for the first time in over a half year, my smile turns into a grin and there is no sadness behind my simple, "Hello."

You.

2010-08-17T01:31:00.000-07:00

There was a point
at which my Nothing
became Something
you were that point -
you taught me to fly,
then helped me Soar
and then let go
only when you knew
I was more than just
Something.
I could be Anything.

I have never really written a word until today. I had written a blog, but you hated that word. I had written some screenplays and other things but you wanted me to be more than words on a computer screen, or a movie never made. You wanted my words to live longer than us, I realize that now: you wanted to walk into your favorite place: a bookstore, or for someone, anyone, to walk into a bookstore, one day, and pick up something I had written, it’s all you ever wanted for me, and so now I will finally really write, for you.

I met you when I had just turned nineteen years old. I didn’t know what love was, I didn’t even know that I had fallen in love, or what it felt like to fall in love, because it happened so fast and it was nothing like the books I had read: there was no searching or wondering, there was no courting or grand passages written about the quiet grace of your features or the allure of my lovely madness: we met, and then we were just in love. I was a sad girl when you met me, I have always been sad, and you loved that sadness for some reason, maybe because you were sad too, and we were both funny about it so that made it okay, I guess. I was just a kid, back then, and you were a grown man, I had just started my life and you were half-way through with yours, only we didn’t know that at the time, and I don’t know that we would have done anything differently if we had known, because we couldn’t have loved any longer and harder than we did, our love never ended even though it should have, many times.

You told me once you wished there was a word stronger than love, because it just didn’t seem to be enough to describe how you felt for me, and I knew exactly what you meant. It was almost too much for me to bear, someone who had never been loved, who had spent most of her life curled up in a little ball hoping for just one peaceful minute; wishing for just a moment to not feel hated and yelled at like I had been for as far back as I could remember, and then suddenly to be loved by a man who was larger than life to me, who knew everything, it was overwhelming and swallowed me whole in one big gulp, it happened just like that. And then there was that day when we left the Antique baseball hat for the waitress on the Lower East Side as a tip because she told us she would pay hundreds of dollars for it, that it was a collectors item and we just left it there for her, a tip for a thirteen dollar meal, and that was the day I knew I would love you forever, and forever has just ended for you, and it was true, I loved you for your forever, and it was all because of that hat and the way you uncurled me from my ball and taught me everything.

And then decades passed. A few decades went by like a trip to the movies on a Saturday afternoon, a trip to our favorite Art House Theater in Lincoln Square, maybe a burger afterwards and a sleepy cab ride home with the New York Times under your arm and your head on my shoulder, and then it was all over, the best movie I have ever seen, it had everything: it started with a hat and looped and rolled through years of turbulence and fierce passion, and then years of devoted friendship that turned two people into family, and somehow, brilliantly, the Director, or Writer, managed to turn this average story about a little brown-haired girl in her first year of college and her first time in a big city, and a man with gold-rimmed glasses whose slightly enlarged proboscis was always in a book, two kids who met working at a bar and fell in love, into the story of something stronger than just love, and friendship, and family: it was a story about the meaning of Everything, it was a movie about all that matters, and now it’s over but it changed my life just like every great book I have ever read, that’s how much our story soars.

It was only a few decades, that went by too fast, but this was your lifetime, it turns out, and when you said only weeks ago that you would love me forever, you were telling me the truth because you always told me the truth, you would never lie or let me feel like I was going to be forgotten, that was your gift, you found me and you never let me go just like you promised so many years ago, and you always kept your promises to me. I might have moved away a few times so you could go be in love with a few other women you also met working in a bar, because that’s what you did, although you should have done so much more, you were so smart and your writing was magnificent, but you wanted me to be the writer, you always wanted everything for me because you really did love me more than yourself. I might have moved away but I also came back and we loved again, even stronger this time because our love was just stronger than the plain old regular love you had found and thrown away to have another chance with me.

I might have moved away yet again, years later, right after we had decided to get married, and after all we did not get married because you were never one for paperwork, but that didn’t stop our word stronger than love, it made it grow, if that was even possible, because we became free from relationship pressures, and we became real friends, but not just the kind of friends that always show up or never forget your birthday: the kind of friends that would have done anything for each other for no other reason than, we knew the other would do the same. So our friendship became family just because, again, there is no other word stronger than friendship, and I knew I was your whole family when I watched your parents die, one by one, and you were left with only me, a brother who went away, and a few barmaids that came and went, and so I kept on loving you because of that hat but now because of so much more, you saved my life, more than once, nothing mattered when the Buildings Fell in NY that day except to get to each other, and we kept living that way and that’s why I saw you a week before you died, we had never been apart, really, until now.

So now there is Now. You were preparing me for this, I just know it, our daily talks were never superficial, you were trying to teach me to be more than just this, and I know you want me to fill the world with words because they were the only thing you believed in, and I want to do this for you, because of that time you told me I had more courage than you, that you could not bare your soul on the page as I can, and I know with this you were setting me free to see what I could do on my own. And I was on my own, for eighteen years before I met you so I know I can live without you but I have a feeling you somehow managed to grow inside of me, and maybe that’s why our love was stronger than love, you were growing in there all along and so that’s helpful to know as I bash my head repeatedly into the walls of my apartment hoping the fresh stain of blood will cover up where you had last touched that wall only weeks ago, and you wrote me that text just after you left town telling me how much you loved me and how happy you were that I am living at the beach and asking what will you do without me. Well, now you will never have to be without me because you are inside me like the pages of a book, a complicated, highly intelligent book about a paradox of a person who was at once wildly social and also almost a hermit who loved to hide in a cabin in the woods under a pile of blankets. But you never hid from me: and I was the only one who never lost you for a second and that makes me as happy as I can be on a day such a this – a You-less Day, when I sit down and finally really write, just like you always wanted me to do.

There is one memory that sticks out so prominently in my brain that I am almost certain it is You in there, popping your head out once in a while to make sure I am still paying attention to the world, and that memory is not just twenty three Holidays together, or the day in the canoe at the cabin in Vermont when you told me after sixteen years you were"over the hump" and ready to marry me. No this memory is a car ride with you, one of many, and not the one in which you talked me out of believing in God, but the other one, in which we listened to Dire Straits Making Movies hundreds of times over, and while there was still light I read aloud to you, as you drove, from the pages of Harper’s or the New Yorker, we were driving to Kansas to see our old friend, and we got in a fight along the way and broke up for the thousandth time, which did not stick, for the record, and for those keeping score: it never stuck, not to this day, we were never apart. On that trip you told me you were not scared of death: we brought this up because there was a huge tornado headed our way, but we were still young then, and in later years you became more scared, but only because you wanted to make sure I would always be okay, that’s all you cared about anymore, and it filled your life and gave you purpose, and I didn’t mind because I have always felt all alone on this Earth and it was nice to know there was someone out there looking out for me.

So now there is Now, and no more You, and I am Something, and it all means Everything. But for some reason I feel as naïve as that farm girl who moved to Manhattan to go to college and fell in love with the one person in my life who I just knew would never leave me, and now you are gone and I am not sure what comes next. I shouldn't be so scared, I should be prepared for all of this, I have all of your lesson plans, you were a diligent teacher, and there was no experience between us from which I did not learn something. I learned whether something was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do, I learned from you every second, so now maybe I know Everything, just like you did when I met you, but the point to this all is that I have to get it into that bookstore or it all meant nothing, and all those years we struggled to pay our bills and you slung drinks over the bar to make sure I was taken care of, especially after I got sick and you still wanted me to write because you knew there was something inside both of us and somehow you knew I was the only one who had a chance of getting it out there. I shouldn't be so lonely because there is You in there, talking to me, telling me to care about others and always leave big tips especially for tired bartenders who have worked a long shift. But I am lonely, and scared, and sad and there needs to be a word bigger and stronger than "loss" because that just doesn't seem to encompass the hole in the middle of my heart where you have always been. But as your favorite writer, Samuel Beckett, once said, I can't go on, I'll go on. So now, I have to write it all down, for you, because books were not the only thing you believed in: you believed in me.

I will write now, for you.

June 29, 2010

2010-06-29T23:29:00.000-07:00

Things to Do:

1. End the Book.
2. Stop writing.
3. Just Be Quiet.

I have been struggling lately to write, because I am not sure anymore what being a writer means for me specifically, and what it means to the people around me. Am I a chronicler of events, I wonder, is it merely the case that I write down what happens around me, or is it inevitable my perspective on things pervade my every sentence? If this is the case, should I simply stop writing, because that seems to be the only way not to hurt anyone? I remember Nelly the Billionaire’s Daughter once told me that I have a “snake tongue”. And she was right, for all her histrionics and fits of rage (and there I go again, instigating my point of view as I try to retell events) she had a moment of clarity: I do have a gift for being able to reduce a person not only to tears, but also causing them to reevaluate their entire character, just because I know how to spin a phrase. People like Nelly, unarmed as I am with the weapons of language and heightened perception, fall prey to my barbs and I’m left wondering why I have lost so many friends; why someone as kind as I am has a list of enemies that would rival only that of Hitler or Bin Laden, and it’s all because I can write, so I have been thinking perhaps its time to put down my pen and quiet the snake tongue for once and for all.

What sparked this recent bout of self-loathing was the fact that my older sister, the one of the white-blonde hair and watery blue eyes, lost her mind last week, and I am not sure, but her downward spiral might have been sparked by a mention of her in my column a few weeks ago. I didn’t mean to hurt her, I rarely ever mean to hurt anyone, but that is beside the point, because I brought her up, and her troubled past with her children, and she sent me a message after she read it, fuming that I had characterized her actions as some sort of abandonment of her children years ago, and I was mildly surprised because I was there, at the time, and there is no other way to recount what happened. I was merely speaking the words out loud, telling the story as it had occurred, even conscious of handling it gently, and it’s as if just reading the words sent her into a tailspin – multiple emails followed, as I quickly backtracked and apologized, and things settled, even seemed loving and sisterly and I glowed into that evening thinking my writing had brought me closer to a sibling I had not communicated with in years.

A week later, my sister lost her mind. Quite literally, and seemingly sparked by some incident with her husband, who was the Best Man in my other sister’s Wedding From Hell (at which my Mother had threatened my Dad’s life and there were fist fights and champagne thrown in faces, police called and ambulances summoned), but I am left to wonder if my snake tongue has struck again, and if my role as The One in Our Family Who Writes it All Down has landed my sister in a mental hospital. It’s a bone-chilling thought, and as I question my part in her breakdown and my self-anointment as Narrator and begin to see myself as someone who is now not just recounting, but possibly causing events to spin out of control around me, the strangest thing is happening to me: I find myself unable to not write about the events of my sister’s past week. Sense needs to be made of it all, and I realize I am the writer's equivalent of the Inmate Running the Asylum but there is no way to leave this out of My Story: the tale must be told. And then, perhaps, I will finally write the two words that need to be written the most right now, because there has to be calm in all this lunacy, there has to be a way to quiet the demons that swirl in and out of my life and the lives of the people around me, and the only way to end it might be to simply write, for once and for all: The End.

Last week began with a series of almost giddy phone calls between family members as there was Big News to be Dispersed: my sister, it seemed, the one who hasn’t spoken to many of us in years, was getting a divorce, and we tried, for all our broken ways of dealing with hardship, to rally around her: calls were made to lawyers, plans were hatched regarding her two small children and a possible custody battle: everyone was gentle and kind, because my family is full of heart and my sister was, at long last, reaching out to us, and that seemed like a good thing as we all have gotten older and are tiring of clichéd family feuds.

But as the week progressed, it became apparent to all of us that something was very wrong with my sister, there was no divorce, only foggy versions of some alternate world she had descended into quite rapidly, and suddenly it was no longer fun to gossip about: she was very sick, and somehow I, the most unstable card in the precarious house of cards we call a family, got the final call from my sister as she clung onto her last moments of clarity before she was admitted to a mental hospital the next morning. That call lasted seven hours, and I, being a good sister, helped find my sister a hotel in the middle of the night to escape the people supposedly chasing her, and my heart broke for her as I have been there before, on the precipice of madness, and there was nothing I could do to help, I just watched her fall over the cliff and cried for hours the next day because this is not just an internet column, or a book, or a television show, or a movie, this is my sister’s life unraveling, and all I can do right now is write, and write and write until the story is over and I am falling into that novice writer trap of not knowing how to wrap it all up neatly because there is no clever way to sum up what has happened.

It’s been ten years since I spent a long haul at a Mental Hospital in Denver, and I was in better shape than my sister is now, I think. I think, but I cannot be sure because we have to wonder whether we can trust our Narrator here, but I think I was just sad and needed a rest. Although I do remember I was quite sure if I took the knit hat off of my head that my head would roll off, and I am still not positive whether my roommate, a homeless girl with a name that sounded like a vacuum cleaner brand, crawled into my bed at night or whether that was in my imagination, but other than that I remember I loved my white pajamas with blue polka dots on them that I had gotten from the Gap and I wore them every single day. My only other memory of that time was trotting down the hallway every few minutes to answer another call on the hall phone, as I have lots of friends and a big family, and I remember trying to pretend everything was better than it was on the phone because I am uncomfortable being the center of attention. I called my sister the other day on the hall phone in her hospital and some guy answered the phone: “Pizza Hut!” and I remember thinking even back then that it was slightly inconvenient that other Mental Patients were answering the phone for me.

It’s remarkable to me how little I recall of that stay in the Mental Hospital: my Best Friend brought me baked goods every day at 4 PM because she worked in a bakery, and I had been visiting her when I had my breakdown so she was the only person I knew in Denver. At the time I didn’t know how serious it was, but now I am thinking this must have been very hard for my Best Friend from Denver to watch me crumble right before her eyes. I remember my Dad brought a friend to visit me in the hospital, some sort of military guy I see every so often on Fox News who was rumored years ago to have been romantically involved with my Mom while they were still married, and my friend from college who happened to be skiing in Colorado at the time brought a guy she had met on the Internet and a cute little outfit from Express for me as a gift.

I can still picture that smart skirt my friend from College brought me: it had flowers all over it and came with a matching blouse. I remember wondering if I would ever get out of the hospital and have a real job to which I could wear such a normal looking outfit, but for some reason I can’t remember how I spent my days in that hospital. Did I play cards with the other patients or did we just sit and watch television all day? Did I have friends in there, and nice, sympathetic doctors? Did I read all those great novels I was always too busy to read? Was I really sick and swatting at imaginary flies, or was I just broken hearted from my recent breakup with my boyfriend? I have no idea anymore, but hearing my sister on the phone last week after they admitted her seemed scarily familiar to me. I have been there before, maybe not exactly where she is, in that exact hospital or in that extreme state of paranoia, but I have been there before and my heart aches for her as I find myself hoping she has a friend who bakes nearby, and a pair of pajamas she loves and a good, sensible hat to keep her head from falling off, because I don’t know how I ever got out of that place but I know I would never like to go back.

While my sister sits in some hospital in St. Louis, there is no choice but to sleepwalk through my days and hope for the best. Maybe it’s just a small bout of insanity, a temporary break from reality, something long overdue for her as she has struggled her whole life with everything – just like everyone in my family she wrestled herself from the grips of the combination of a horrific childhood with a mentally unstable mother, and, I am certain, some sort of genetically obtained mental imbalance. My sister with the white blonde hair fought her way through her troubled childhood while I cried my way through mine – we all had our own ways of fending off the inevitability of a breakdown, and I guess my only surprise this past week is that it took my sister this long to finally give up fighting and lie down in that hospital bed and close her eyes for a little while. I hope this little break gives her the rest she needs, and that that is all there is to this story, because this is a chapter I write with dread and I can’t wait to finish so I can get back to writing about Sarahs, neurotic movie stars and non-committal boyfriends. This is one time in my life I wish I didn’t have a story to tell at all. For this particular story, please, let this be: The End.

June 10, 2010

2010-06-11T00:15:00.000-07:00

Things to Do:

1. Send a Thank You Note to my Best Friend from Denver for her Thank You Note.
2. Send a Thank You Note to my College Acting Teacher for letting my Niece take her class for free, which was probably her way of Thanking me for teaching a class for her.
3. Stop the maddening cycle of Thank Yous and Thank You Notes.

It was really late, maybe 4 A.M one night when I had the urge to send Sarah an email. There is a reason these impulses only happen under the cover of night: in the light of day it might be embarrassing to chase down a girl who was at one time my best friend and has not wanted anything to do with me for years. But recent events have brought on introspection, regret, remorse, and most of all a desperate need to figure out what went so wildly wrong with my life. What’s funny is, I have been kind of – dare I say – happy lately, as happy as a single, family-less, ex-party girl can be so I don’t quite know what I am searching for. I love my new apartment, it is spacious and comfortable and allows for beachside bike rides and barbeques, and I don’t like going out much anymore so I have more than enough friends. I have a relatively quiet job assisting a group of nerdy television writers who are quick to compliment my often sequined outfits and sun-kissed hair. I don't have a boyfriend but I have a boyfriend-like guy who is great company and who makes out with me sometimes when I am not feeling well, and maybe I don't have that girl I talk to a hundred times a day anymore, but I hate the phone anyway and I have a pen pal to whom I can tell anything, so there doesn't seem to be too much more need for co-dependency in my life.

But for some reason I emailed Sarah, just to tell her I am writing again, and show her the generosity of spirit I wish more people would show me, and she wrote back, cheerful as ever, as if we had continued talking eighty-five times a day this whole time, and I remembered that I always thought she should have a permanent exclamation point at the end of her name: “Sarah!” should be her legal name because she always seems happy to hear from you. So we arranged to have drinks, and I am prepared for an ambush, but I don’t feel inculpable enough to prevent an onslaught of criticism, and I hope I don’t become so nervous I revert back to the manic and high-strung person she decided to abandon years ago. I miss Sarah terribly, just because it always made me feel great that someone as good-hearted as her would choose to have me as a friend, but I am not naive enough to think we will ever be friends again, for I am afraid too much has passed between these smiles. Still it will be nice to see her, I heard she is getting married and I am glad to see at least one of our lives turned out the way it was supposed to.

My fifteen year old niece recently moved to town, and it’s nice to have some family around even though my history with her mom, my sister, is complicated, but I have come to realize there are not many people in the world with whom I do not have a stormy past. I wish all that mattered to people was the present or maybe even just the future, because I don’t plan on having any more feuds for a while, I am too tired for acrimony and all these little battles are making me feel like Serbia: poor and war-torn, and old scars never seem to heal, I am defeated and I am in no position to negotiate.

My niece wants to be an actress, and I can relate because for a few years when I was younger I wanted to be an actress too: I was in a play called Crimes of the Heart and I was awful, my voice sounded like a cat screeching as I mangled the Southern accent, but I felt really cute in my costume and soon learned that I got a thrill from working behind the scenes and directing plays rather than suffer through the anxiety of the spotlight. I assisted the head of our high school drama department, Mrs. Houghton, who wore pantsuits and had big 1970’s glasses and her blonde hair was set so it would flip up at the ends every day. During my study hours I would come and student teach all our drama classes, and that’s how I met the swim team guy who got me drunk on peppermint schnapps and tried to teach me how to give him a blow job in the tenth grade. The poor guy just got puked on, but he gets an A for effort, and that was the only semi-sexual experience I ever had before I met my sixteen-year boyfriend. It was a blur of forced fellatio and I would never even have come in contact with such a good looking, popular guy if it were not for the theater requirement and my foray into student teaching. I hope my niece does not have the same experience as I did, and never drinks schnapps or lets any cool guy make her think he likes her just because she helped him pass his theater class: the rest of my experience with theater turned out quite innocently, full of dorky cast parties and much time spent as the back of a camel while touring with Raggedy Andy and Ann.

She is shy, my niece, and I could only yearn to someday be called shy, but I was also awkward as a teenager, so I feel like I can relate to her as she searches for a way to make herself matter out here in the land of celebrity cullture and media overload. Some days she wants to be a singer, some days an actress, and some days a writer, and I admire her ambition because all I ever wanted when I was her age was for the President of our Class to ask me to prom, and to get my driver’s license and I got neither of those things for a long time – I didn’t get my license until I was 26 years old, and I did end up sleeping with the Class President years later while visiting him at Harvard Medical School and I can honestly say that was one wasted teenage fantasy. My college Acting Teacher has a school in Los Angeles now, and she coaches many famous people, most notably a big bosomed star who became famous because of a sex tape. My old Acting Teacher is actually quite a genius at what she does, it should be pointed out that she didn’t have a lot to work with when it came to her well-endowed client.

When my Acting Teacher arrived at our somewhat stuffy little college, she was young and pretty, fresh out of Yale Drama, and we were all completely obsessed with her. She had us write in daily journals, and I poured my heart out into mine. I still have it, a shoddy little green plastic binder filled with pages and pages of boyfriend angst and insecurities and pathetic little crudely taped pictures of my family as if any of them were a big part of my life back then. I thought my older sister was beautiful, she had two children at a very young age and ended up leaving them with her ex-husband, which was a very hard situation for everyone in my family to deal with, as if we didn’t have enough division, and I had pictures of her in that Acting Journal and I wrote about how her eyes are a watery blue and I would give anything for her golden, almost white blonde hair instead of writing about how heartbreaking her decision to leave her children was for everyone, especially for her. I remember visiting her for Spring Break that year in Daytona Beach and she cried to me about how much she missed her kids, and years later, when my family turned on her, I never forgot how sad she was when I visited her back then, talking about the children she had just chosen to leave behind. I didn’t write about that in my journal. I only wrote about my own pain, nobody else’s because I was overwhelmed with pain and didn’t have the room in my brain to feel anything else.

My Acting Teacher would collect the journals every once in a while and write long responses to what we had written, and I will never forget what she wrote as a response to my ramblings about salad dressing and my countless pages of predictable relationship troubles. She said, “You are incredibly committed to everything you do.” And she was right, of all the things people can say about me, I'm weird, crazy, the spinner of tale tales: but I'm committed – I stayed with my ex-boyfriend for sixteen years minus a three year break instigated by him and fueled by a passionate relationship he had with a cocktail waitress. I never give up on friendships, no matter how toxic they become, I would never turn my back on anyone because I know how badly it feels, and I would have stayed at my job forever with the Famous Actress if her Producing Partner did not leave me writhing in pain on my office floor so many times I was forced to leave that job and go hide under a rock for years. Hers was a paltry observation of a complex individual but I think, reading back over my journal now years later, my Acting Teacher was right to single out that quality, it was probably the gentlest response she could come up with – a harsher comment would have been that I was on the road to an actual nervous breakdown, which took a few years but eventually, and inevitably, occurred.

That journal was written when I was twenty years old. I am quite a few years older now, and I have never lost touch with that Acting Teacher. She has hopefully forgotten the note I had left in her mailbox at school so many years ago in which I told her I had a crush on her (I had no idea how to express gratitude at that age, except, apparently under the guise of some smutty Cinemax Movie), and she graciously let my Niece take an acting class at her school out here last week. I have forgiven her for tearing out pages of our journals and making other students read our personal thoughts as monologues, I was never really mad at that, just a bit shocked when I heard the description of my first suicide attempt read aloud by a student in class. She let me co-teach one of her Acting Classes about Screenwriting a few years ago, and it was a thrill to share the stage with one of the great unsung performers in Los Angeles. I rarely talk to her, but she called me on the hallway payphone when I was in the mental hospital in Denver and I will never forget that. Turns out she was right, I was committed.

As I mentally prepare to meet up with Sarah for the first time in a long time, I think back about that Journal and how there were so many indicators of the mental illness I was probably already experiencing and which would get worse in the years to come. My little sister has not spoken to me in almost four years, for probably the same reason I have lost so many Sarah’s, she just could not breathe around me as my illness seems to need to feed off others to survive like some sort of airborne virus, and my older sister who had left her children has only recently, hesitantly, begun to communicate with our family who persecuted her for years and years for the mistakes she made when she was no older than I was when I wrote my Acting Journal. I would like to think that this new sort of Journal I am amassing is less chaotic than the Journal that preceded my slow descent into madness, but I am not sure, because a column I wrote a while back about my problem with honesty has spurned the loss of my friend the Angry Indian who no longer trusts anything I say, so I am still losing friends, albeit at a slower rate than my days of true insanity.

I hope I am really getting better, I don't know, maybe my insanity has morphed into a more insidious kind of illness that disguises itself as a Peaceful Warrior and I am in reality crazier than ever. As it has always been, I can see everything clearly, too clearly, which is in its own way maddening. When I feel a bout of mania coming on I rent the most obscure German film I can find and stay in on a Friday night as opposed to attaching a tuft of fake hair to my pony tail and driving my car to the edge of some pier somewhere determined to look as stunning as I can when they find my body lying gracefully adrift in the sea the next morning. Sarah will be able to tell, when I see her, and I will either see the dash of fear in her eyes and she will run from our drinks like she ran from me when bumped into her in West Hollywood a few years ago, or she will be delighted with my calmness and will speak in exclamation points as she is simply happy to see a dear old friend who had lost her way for a while. This might be the most important Drinks of my life so far.

May 26, 2010

2010-05-26T20:15:00.000-07:00

Things to Do:

1. Tell the people still in my life that I love them more often, in case something happens to any of them.
2. Give better hugs.
3. Find someone to kiss.

I found out today that a friend passed away, he killed himself, which is even sadder than the normal death of a friend, and of course I feel like I should have done more to make him feel better. But I have a complicated past with this guy, so I am not sure what more I could have done. I know that I have been really close to trying to kill myself before, I have taken bottles filled with pills and was made to drink charcoal in the Emergency Room, had my stomach pumped and I have spent many nights just staring at my scarily full medicine cabinet trying to gather up the courage to make myself fall asleep permanently, but I have chickened out every time, and one thing I learned from all that was, taking pills is not the way to go. You have far too much time after you have swallowed them to think about what you have done. I am not sure how my friend did it, but I am pretty sure I know how he was feeling and it’s hard to describe how helpless and lost you feel in that moment. I had just gotten a message from him a few days before he died telling me how inspiring I am to him. He told me he would tell me some day why that is, but now he will never get to tell me.

Our complicated past started when I was in college. My school was mostly girls, it had been a Catholic Girls School but had started letting boys in right before I got there. My friend transferred into our college when I was a sophomore, and all the girls were weak-kneed over his looks: he looked almost exactly like the actor Montgomery Clift, he had a JFK Jr. shock of dark hair and hurt, searching brown eyes. He was rumored to have a drug problem but I was only 19 and didn’t even know what drugs looked like, so I let him move into my one bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that I was illegally subletting. He lived in my living room, and would run the bath water every time he went into the bathroom which I thought was odd, and only realized years later it was to hide the sound of snorting drugs. He had a beautiful girlfriend at the time who he met in Central Park, she didn’t need makeup, was about 18, and had long straight brown hair and huge round eyes. They looked like movie stars together, and I remember he used to put his hand in the back pocket of her jeans and I wished my boyfriend would do that with me but he was from Bayonne, New Jersey and that’s just not how a Bayonne boy walks around with his girl.

My friend was a good roommate, he was neat and well-groomed, and we used to sit up and talk all night – I suppose in retrospect he was able to keep his eyes open that late because he was on copious amounts of cocaine, but I was just high on nervous energy, so we made a good pair of late night companions. He was a good roommate until he started bouncing checks to me all over the place, and when I asked him about it, we were on a bench in front of the Ben and Jerry’s on 3rd Avenue, and he looked me right in the eye and promised he would ask his rich dad for the money to pay me back, and was so sorry he had screwed up. He was planning on moving to California the following month with his girlfriend, but he would pay me every penny he owed me before he left. A few days later I worked a long shift at Houlihan’s in Times Square, and I came home around 2 AM, dog-tired, and my apartment was cleaned out. He took everything, my television set, my VCR, all he left was a pile of porno videos he had rented on my video store card, and he had tacked a tee shirt to the wall and had written on it in black sharpie “Sell Out.” To this day I am not sure what that meant, I should have asked him and now I will never know.

The fallout for my Roommate’s premature move was pretty severe for a little 21 year old girl with no money and three jobs. He had racked up 900 dollars in phone sex charges on my phone bill, and had never paid me for all the rent checks he bounced. My Bayonne boyfriend was livid, and we spent hours calling all the numbers on my phone bill trying to track him down. Ahh the days before everything was electronic, because what broke the mystery of his whereabouts wide open was that plane tickets for my Roommate and his girlfriend came in the mail to my apartment. In those days, you could not fly without your hard tickets, so he called me up and told me he would come over with my stuff if I gave him the tickets. I made a list of what he took, and told him what he owed me, and my New Roommate, who years later was a main character on television’s E.R., met him at the apartment to make the exchange. I was there, but I was hiding in my closet. I was suddenly scared that a crazed drug addicted thief was going to kill me, and my new roommate was from the Bronx and Italian and I figured he wasn’t going to take any shit from anyone.

The check my Old Roommate gave to my New Roommate bounced, of course, and the T.V. set and VCR that were given in exchange for the plane tickets were not the ones he had taken from me, but some broken machines he had probably found in the trash. My Bayonne Boyfriend and I tracked him down by telephone a few days later and he just laughed at us on the phone. I was sure I would never hear from that guy again.

But ten years later, when I was living in a different New York City Apartment with the same Bayonne guy, my phone rang. It was my Old Roommate, who was a dead ringer for Montgomery Clift. He wanted to apologize for what he had done years before, and he said he never stopped thinking about it, or me, all those years. I had forgiven him years before, so the phone call was not even necessary. I have an uncanny ability to forgive people the most heinous transgressions, but to never let up on the most mundane slights against me. My Old Roommate kept in touch with me ever since that phone call, and I even saw him in Los Angeles last year, when he brought me a candle that was in an already opened box, and again told me how sorry he was. We went to the Hotel Roosevelt that night, and hung out with some of my friends, and he was as charming and effusive as ever, he had become a DJ in Salt Lake City and was full of inspirational quotes and deeply introspective all night, until he asked me if he could take my bank card to get money out of my account to buy drugs, and I let him, for old times sakes.

Every so often I get a message from my Old Roommate, and it is always heartfelt and sincere, full of admiration and respect for me, which is bizarre to me since when I lived with him I was just a little girl who was sickly in love with her boyfriend and had not achieved anything in my life yet except the ability to sustain unimaginable amounts of verbal abuse from the people I cared most about in the world. It was a shock to find out he took his own life, just because I knew him so well, but not surprising in that he had struggled with a drug problem the whole time I knew him. I learned a lot about myself through my whole ordeal with him, mostly that I will hide in a closet rather than get what is owed to me, and I just can’t stay mad at anyone, for anything, especially someone who seemed to care about me so much, because those people are becoming more and more rare in my life.

I would not call my Old Roommate a close friend anymore, or maybe ever, just someone I lived with and knew for a while, but he was troubled and trying to get better, just like me, so I feel closer with him now than I ever did, and I am writing this for him, because he read this column every week and would always enjoy my stories, and I think he would like that this time my story is about him, and would understand that it was important I tell it truthfully. I wish I believed that we go somewhere after we die, because I think it would make life easier, but I am glad at least that he believed in such things, because I am sure he was just tired of trying so hard and wanted to go somewhere where everything wasn’t always such a struggle, and I am positive right before he died he was happy to think he was about to find out what comes next. Everyone deserves even such a tiny moment of peace, no matter what they have done wrong in their lives, and I hope for myself that I can find that moment while I am still living, not dying, because I hate to think of that one person who may have known me a long time ago sitting over their computer crying after something has happened to me like I am crying over my Old Roommate. I don’t want to make anyone cry, so I guess I am going to stick around for a while.

May 20, 2010

2010-05-20T14:33:00.000-07:00

Things to Do:

1. Find another guy to Non-Date.
2. Find a guy to assemble my new gas grill.
3. Find the cure for M.S.

When I visit New York City it’s like seeing a boyfriend you sleep with occasionally and each time you see each other you pick up right where you left off. This trip it was crowded and smelly, as usual, and exciting and vivacious, and there was some crazy car bomb parked a few blocks from my apartment: people and cities rarely ever really change. I went to New York to see my doctor, but the doctor’s appointment was almost an afterthought to seeing friends and cousins and going to a Yankee Game. Nobody in that city seemed to care that I am trying to clean up my act and live a better life: I wasn’t treated any better, given any special sidewalk space or a reprieve from a long line. That’s what I love about New York: it’s a narcissistic city and completely self-absorbed, just like all the men I date. I’m uncomfortable with affection, have serious intimacy issues, and I feel completely at home being abused by this city. As I walked down the streets feeling slightly ill the other day, the buildings spun around me and I swayed and wobbled, and almost fell about ten times: nobody even noticed. It reminded me of growing up as the middle child of a huge family, when I was sick my Mom would say, “You’ll live.” And maybe give me a can of ginger ale. For a nurse with eight small children, she did not have the gentlest of bedside manners.

Back in Los Angeles, I have moved to the beach. Now that I’m living in a spacious ocean chalet I’m wondering why I didn’t make this move a while ago, but I suppose I felt comfortable suffering in my crime-ridden Korea Town studio. I don’t even know what to do with all this new space, it looks like I’m squatting, but I finally feel like I belong out here: if I start making any kind of money as a writer there is an imminent danger I might actually be a carefree, happy Beachcombing California Girl. My Old Boss who is now my New Boss was nice about me taking off to New York for a few days, but now that I am back he has tasked me with coming up with new ideas for television shows because the show we are working on has been tanking in the ratings. I was hired to assist the writers on the show but my Boss has been using me more and more to assist him: his real assistant is a cocky, good-looking kid who thinks he is too cool to do menial tasks for my Boss. Even with my luxurious new Oceanside apartment and my recent coast-to-coast jaunt, I am not too cool for grunt work, and Hollywood will always make me feel like I am cheating on New York - my flippant, cool boyfriend -- with some guy who surfs and sleeps until noon.

There has been so much change in my life in the past month it seems almost contrived: if I were making this up, a good writer would tell me it’s too much. First, my Non-Boyfriend has decided he would rather spend time by himself than hang out in the eye of the storm with me, so I have not heard from him or seen him in a while. I moved to the beach and decided to start telling the truth for a change, and he lives on the other side of the world from me, in West Hollywood, and apparently prefers fantasy to reality. In retrospect if I had wanted this Non-Relationship to prosper I would have stayed holed up in Korea Town in my studio, but I opted for the lavish and pure life of Oceanside living, so I will be single for a while more, until I meet some tousle-haired beach bum who won’t mind my histrionics if it means a hot meal and a warm place to sleep. Second, I seem to have happened upon the only Hollywood assistant job that is actually, painfully boring, I think I would be better off working in an accountant’s office, or proof-reading M and M’s. There is not enough work to go around in our office. I would fire my unpaid intern if he was not so handsome and precocious: he knows the Box Office Gross of any movie ever made. He is like a film-geek Rainman.

I have also been really sick for a little over a month now. It started with a dumb virus but just like everything associated with my disease, it has morphed and degenerated and it started affecting my speech and ability to walk. It was hard to be cute for a while there, and even though I didn’t miss a day of work, I spent a good deal of the past month researching for our writers behind my computer and trying to act like I was be-bopping to music on my ITunes so nobody could tell that my arms and legs were jerking around because I was so sick. I don’t have an official Los Angeles Multiple Sclerosis Doctor yet, partly because I needed a reason to fly back to my beloved New York City every six months, but this past month I was sick enough to start doctor shopping out here, and I finally settled on the Amazing Dr. Wong, a gorgeous, tall Asian (!) Man whose teeth actually twinkle when he smiles. Dr. Wong is one of those people you just know was potty trained before he was a year old, and probably taught himself to read by age two. His movie star good looks and list of celebrity clientele, including the unstoppably quirky Miss Teri Garr, made him an easy choice against my Insurance covered doctors who all have offices on Alvarado Street and take patients on Saturday. It takes six months to get an appointment with Dr. Wong, and I will be paying thousands to be neglected by yet another stunningly handsome, elusive man. I may be single, and sick, and working a job far beneath my Masters Education and impressive resume, but I have the same doctor as an Actress I have admired since her role as the crazy Mousetrap lady in Scorsese's After Hours and I live at the beach: this really is where people come to live out their dreams.

Last night I taught a class at USC’s Extension Program in Screenwriting, even though I wasn’t feeling well I had told my friend who is a producer that I would do this a long time ago, so I went and talked for two hours about the difference between fact and fiction. I talked about writing an online column about my life, and the fact that some of my friendships have suffered because of my decision a long time ago to only write truthful things even though its hard for me to go an hour in my daily life without telling a lie. I don’t know if I got through to any of my students, many of whom have decided the path to fame is by baring some part of your soul, but the point I was trying to make is for them to make up as much of this stuff as they can: being honest is heart-wrenching and painful and I don’t recommend it to anyone. After my recent gut-spilling via internet I lost a good friend, an Indian guy I have known since High School because he now thinks he can’t trust anything I say. I will miss his sharp barbs and caustic lambasting of my character, but I think a good housecleaning when it comes to friends is long overdue for me. Its easier to get new friends than it is to make amends with the ones I have.

I had a plant last time I lived in Los Angeles. Well, it wasn’t my plant: it belonged to Kristin, the girl who let me sublet her apartment on Crescent Heights. Her Dad was a furniture designer and he made all the furniture in the apartment out of tree stumps so it was like a forest in there. Kristin doesn’t speak to me anymore because when I stole the blue fake suede Express outfit from Fifi, I inadvertently let the blame fall on Kristin’s best friend Club, and I took the plant with me when I moved out. That thing was indestructible: it moved with me three more times before I finally gave it to my sister before moving back to New York. When one side of that plant would shrivel up and die, I would turn the dead part towards the sun and it would regenerate. I wish I had the resilience of that plant. I was thinking of getting a new plant for my new beach-adjacent apartment, but I decide to buy a gas grill instead so I can have a barbeque someday or maybe a boyfriend who likes to eat barbeque. I realize a gas grill costs as much as a visit to the Dashing Dr. Wong, but more social opportunities and eating healthier food might stave off the need for so many doctor’s visits.

I bought a barbeque grill for my apartment in New York City and its still there, my ex-boyfriend who lives in that apartment uses it sometimes. It’s illegal to have propane in the city, but I didn’t know that when I got the thing, and me and the Racist Girl from Nebraska threw some pretty fun parties using that grill before I found out my patio was infested with rats and we started calling it my Rat-io and it stopped being funny finding dead rats lying next to plates of people’s food. I think my second foray into having a home with outdoor space will be more successful, and the guy who sold me my new grill told me the same thing the guy who sold me my first grill told me: it will last you a lifetime. Nothing lasts a lifetime, I have realized. The plant I gave my sister didn’t make it through her second divorce.

I finally called in sick to work today, after being sick at work for a month, but mostly because my gas grill is being delivered, and also because I don’t really care if I get fired from this job. I will collect unemployment and sit lazily on my new balcony grilling steaks all day long, and I’ll crawl back to my Non-Boyfriend and beg him to move in with me so we can split the rent, although it might be tricky to promise him he doesn’t have to commit to me if we are living in the same apartment: tricky but not impossible, as I lived with my ex-boyfriend for five years with just such an arrangement. Nothing lasts forever but I sure try to force things to last a lot longer than their natural course.

Just as I am on my fourth hour of what is supposed to be a one hour assembly job on my new grill, the guy I dated while he had a girlfriend calls to ask me to out to dinner. It’s hard to say no, because he is charming and funny, often irresistible, and brilliantly sarcastic, but I look around at my brand new, sparsely decorated apartment and its nice having everything clean, and I think I will try to do things differently from now on. Change is terrifying for me, even good, healthy change, and I know I can’t run away from all the problems I have left behind me but I can try and stop from destroying anything new today. So after I finish putting together my grill, I put on pajamas and curl up on my couch (one of only five pieces of furniture in my new, sprawling apartment) with the new novel by my favorite author, a South African guy who has been writing novels for years and only recently started incorporating himself more and more into his work as he nears the end of his life and introspection is inevitable. I am still young, and I hope all this change in my life will make the next part more manageable. Just like the plant I stole from Kristin, I have moved to the beach to turn myself around and face the sunlight so part of me won't die and I would like to start living a life that the Amazing Dr. Wong might feel is worthy of saving.

April 15, 2010

2010-04-21T14:30:00.000-07:00

Things to Do:

1. Take a minute, breathe.
2. Start lying about the important things in life such as my age and orgasms.
3. Stop lying about every other aspect of my life.

I have only been at my new job a few days and I already have the feeling it’s not going to last very long. I get nervous when I meet new people: I want them to like me almost pathologically, so I haven’t stopped talking for three straight days. I don’t know why I think people want to listen to me talk for that long, but silence makes me anxious, so I talk and talk, and because there is not much to talk about, most of the things coming out of my mouth are untrue. I spent last night looking this up on the internet, and apparently it’s a real psychological malady called Compulsive Lying Disorder and I stayed up until three in the morning reading message boards about the condition. I am suddenly empowered by the fact that my dishonesty has a clinical name, and there are other people who walk around telling lies all day. Although some of the people in the online forums are clearly wasting the opportunity to have a medical community recognize their amorality as a sickness, like the guy who says he has been telling people he is a vegetarian for years but secretly eating meat. I can’t believe I have never looked into this before, I have been in four mental hospitals and lost about thirty really good friends, and until now I have chalked this up to my eccentric nature. I remember the Sarah with the Big Boobs telling me people in Los Angeles talk about me worse than they talk about their dogs: I guess this is what she was talking about.

I’ve never really been called out about my lying before, I guess I am good at it, but I think some people have been suspicious over the years, because unless my friends and family think I like driving around in an antique car, they are probably aware I have not exactly achieved the level of success I tout in my stories. As I’ve gotten a little older, I have grown weary of making things up, at this point I mostly just cover up for all the lies I told in the past, but since this is a new job and I want to impress everyone, I have gotten a few classics out of the hall closet and brushed them off, such as the imminent nature of my book publishing, which in actuality is a deal I lost a long time ago having never handed in the manuscript. I remember hearing from the Billionaire’s Daughter a while ago that Fifi doubted I actually have Multiple Sclerosis. Sigh. I wish I had made that one up, and if I had I would have picked a disease that had a name I could pronounce.

It’s strange walking around knowing you have a mental disorder, one with a name and chat rooms, and I decide to try not to lie for a day, but I am surprised at how hard this is to accomplish. I start with the tiny lies, about highlighting my hair (previous to my self-diagnosis I would have said, no, my hair is just sun-kissed), and move on to the bigger ones, the inventions that are bourn of a serious, crippling insecurity and seem to me to be as transparent as a window pane. I am tempted to call my family and friends and confess everything, but the liar in me resists the temptation because in addition to an inferiority complex apparently I am also co-dependant. I call my old psychiatrist for help when I realize this is all too big for me to tackle on my own. I saw this doctor for a year after I got out of the mental hospital in Denver, and when I moved back to LA a few years ago for the summer and lived in the Hancock Park guest house.

He is a child psychiatrist, but at the time he happened to be the only psychiatrist in Los Angeles covered by my insurance, and he agreed to see me even though I am twice the age of all of his patients. Its fitting I would have a kids doctor, as kids seem to be the only people I am honest with lately, and I have my reservations about this guy but now that I have figured out what’s wrong with me I want desperately to be someone who is forthright and trustworthy, I didn’t know how much until I tried to stop. I also have realized lately, and this is not unconnected, that I am madly in love with my Semi-Boyfriend, and coming clean to him is proving to be tricky. He has been on the receiving end of many of my inane fabrications, and unweaving that complicated tapestry without scaring him away for good is going to be a challenge. A huge part of me wants to run from the whole situation, find new friends and a new Semi-Boyfriend, there must be some guy out there who doesn’t care if his Semi-Girlfriend lies to him all the time as long as he has a pretty girl to hang out with who always makes him laugh.

As I enter this phase of serious introspection, for some reason I keep thinking about the Son of the Famous Baseball player, who hung out with us the summer I lived in the guest house. He was a really handsome guy, and ended up dating my friend Kara for a brief time, before she went totally psychotic on him, and he had a really bad drug problem. His Dad is one of the most famous Los Angeles players ever, and was an alcoholic who had affairs on his wife his whole life, and my friend was abundantly screwed up. I am thinking a lot about him because even though he was completely addled by cocaine, he was startlingly honest. He had so many reasons to lie, and he never did. He never talked to me again after the Migration of the Sarahs, and I would not even say we were real friends to begin with, but I think a lot about the way he would look you right in the eye and always told the truth. I don’t think I will ever be that direct, but I would give anything for about one tenth of his ability to tell even the most embarrassing truths.

I think it would help me be more honest if I had some real accomplishments to talk about, so I am staying late at work tonight to try and start work on a script. My job has been relatively easy, so far: coffee runs and requisitioning laptops from the Studio have taken up most of my day, so my brain is empty at night for the first time in a long time, and I'm anxious to put all these words in my head down on paper. I also think that there is excess creative energy floating around in my brain due to my new resolve not to make things up in my daily life. I figure I might as well capitalize on my new morality, so I start writing down an idea for a script that I have been telling people for a while now I have already written. I realize as I’m writing that I already came up with most of the story when I was trying to convince people this thing was already written. I am at work until almost ten PM and I have a quarter of the script written down.

At ten I get a text from a guy I dated briefly a few years ago (and by dated I mean I slept with him a few times, for some reason nobody ever has to buy me dinner) and he wants to meet up for a drink. I haven’t heard from this guy in a while, but I am on a manic high from my bout of productivity and my recent surge of soul-searching, so I agree to grab a drink and hope it doesn’t lead to anything more because that would be hard to explain to my Semi-Boyfriend, now that I am not allowed to lie anymore. When I arrive, he looks alarmingly cute in a plaid lumberjack shirt, and it turns out he just wants help with a script he is writing, so I don’t have to worry about Non-cheating on my Non-boyfriend and lying about it. I think my days of loose morals are behind me, or maybe nobody wants to sleep with me anymore, either way I am on my way home by 11:15 and it feels good to tell my Semi-Boyfriend the truth for once.

I have to be at work by 7 AM because it’s important to get to the office before all of my superiors, and it’s the only time of the day when the office is totally quiet. Tonight I am feeling so invigorated (read: manic) that I think maybe I will get some work done on my script in the morning, and I set my alarm for extra early because that's what successful writers do. It’s hard to be funny when I feel like my whole world has just changed and nobody is going to be laughing about it when they realize I am such a fraud, but somehow before I go to sleep I write down a few ideas for funny scenes in the leather journal the Ex with the Wife sent me for Christmas, and I hope this manic episode lasts long enough to finish this script so I can sell it and some of the lies I have told will become truths. A few people in the Internet Forum for Compulsive Liars talk about moving to other countries to escape their lies, and most of the people on there have lost their spouses because of their compulsion to fabricate even the most miniscule parts of their lives. I don’t think I have to move away, and I won’t lose my significant other because I don’t officially have one, but I do have something most of those chat room geeks don’t have: a fake career writing stories about things that never really happened. If my writing is half as good as the lies I have told, I think I'm going to be a huge success.

April 9, 2010

2010-04-09T14:00:00.000-07:00

Things to Do:

1. Pray the Security Guard at the Paramount Bronson Gate does not recognize me from sneaking onto the lot with Sarah to go to a party a few years ago.
2. Buy new clothes for new job and new life.
3. Find out what the Devil wants in return for Fourth Chance at Success.

I’m suffering from post-birthday malaise, but I don’t have much time to be melancholy because I’ve just bartered my soul to the Hollywood Devil, and I start training at a new job on Monday. It was all quite baffling, actually: I had resigned myself to becoming some sort of domestic assistant, armed with my years of experience as a Caterer to the Stars with Fifi, when I got a call from my old Boss – an affable guy I worked for as an assistant at the Big Action Company. He is producing a television show, a nighttime soap opera, and they need a writer’s assistant, a job that could quickly transition to Story Editor if I keep my head down and do a great job. The show is a midseason replacement, and the first episode had huge numbers, so they are adding some staff. I’m surprised my old Boss thought of me, we got along while I worked for him, but he helped get me my first Executive job for the Big Comedy Director, and the Comedy Director’s Producing Partner, who ended up firing me because he decided he did not like me as a person, called my Old Boss afterwards and told him I was abusing my expense report. I did have a rather hefty expense account at that job, I spent about a thousand dollars a month, but to be fair, those dinners and drinks and lunches and breakfasts were above board: I don’t have any friends who are not in the Business.

My Old Boss had a sign in his office while I worked for him that said: “Sell the Sizzle Not the Steak!!” which kind of said everything you needed to know about him. He was the guy everyone liked to have at their party: he wore hip glasses and had spiky hair, and underneath his Hollywood Insider status, he was really just a goodhearted nerd with a wife he met at a Jewish Singles mixer. His Dad was the Business Manager for the Big Action Producer, which is clearly how he got his job, and I think because he was not the smartest person in the world, he spent a lot of time trying to sell the sizzle and getting people to believe in him. After working for him for a year, I grew to respect the fact that he was good to people: all of our writers were loyal to him and he also had good relationships across town. The problem is our projects were kind of terrible, and most of the writers who wrote them mediocre. His rival in our company was the British and insufferable Boss who sexually harassed me, who had an Oxford degree and the attitude to back it up: he had open disdain for my kind-natured Boss, it was a rivalry that made everyone uncomfortable at office meetings, and when the British Boss tried to hike up my skirt with a golf club at a Creative Meeting, my Boss called a lawyer for me immediately.

My Old Boss called me three days ago about the job, and I went in that same day to interview. I did not have to do much to get this job, I’ll admit, and I think it’s because my Old Boss wants someone in the office who is loyal to him. I will be loyal, because I’m grateful to have a job. Piecing together Coverage Money was getting difficult, and I don’t think I could get my old job back as the Hand Job Queen of Bel Air now that I’m over 35. I will be assisting a team of three writers, and that means a lot of coffee runs, but the offices are on the Paramount Lot, and we seem to have a lot of real estate there as there are trailers for makeup and the lead actors littered across part of the lot as well as a couple of buildings allotted to the set of the Television Family’s home. I start my job officially on Monday, but yesterday I went to a table read with all the actors from the show, and it was thrilling to see some very seasoned actors – one Oscar Winner who plays the father of the family, and the brother of a very famous Actor who plays a son – and some bored young actors read from the script, which of course was only semi-good as it seems my Old Boss is still selling everything but the steak.

Now that I’m working for a television show on the Paramount Lot, I can be more aloof with my semi-boyfriend, who gave me a beautiful bouquet of flowers for my birthday and took me whale watching, where we spotted a Mother Gray Whale and her calf. I was anything but cool when we spotted the Whales, I was in sheer ecstasy, and I have never felt so overwhelmingly in love with a man who is, on paper, just my friend. There was something about those damn Whales. Mother and daughter, spraying water into the cold air, shying away from our boat as the Mother protects her young, and me: a childless girl nearing the age where childless will no longer be a temporary status but a permanent one, and not at all protected by my Mother, nor the Gods of Relationships who have deemed I will remain sickly in love with a man who just likes hanging out with me.

And also as a girl who now has a relatively good job, I can revert to the kind of communication which exists in a semi-relationship: those once a day texts that may or may not get returned, and the tentative weekend plan for which I will only surrender either one actual Friday or Saturday night, and the other will be a Sunday, thus leaving Friday open for guys who actually want a real relationship with me or producers who want to help me with my writing in exchange for sex. My new job pays a woeful and paltry sum, so I still have some coverage to do and I have to read all of the writing samples for the writing staff of the television show, so I don’t have much time this weekend to fraternize anyway.

Despite my newly packed schedule, I can’t cancel my drinks with my friend Samantha, who I met years ago when we were both assistants. She is nice enough, I suppose, but she has a chip on her shoulder and is a bundle of negative energy and I’m scared to cancel on her. She always talks about how the Universe has screwed her over somehow, and how people who have achieved success, especially in Hollywood, got “lucky.” I’m dreading her reaction to my recent bout of good fortune, and at the last minute I text her and tell her I’m not feeling well because I can’t imagine someone raining on my parade today – this is one time having Multiple Sclerosis comes in handy. I've never thought of myself as particularly lucky, because everything I have ever gotten in my life has been a struggle, and I don't feel much like being told tonight that my luck has changed, because I know Hollywood jobs are fleeting, and it's only a matter of time before this show gets cancelled and I am wheeling my shopping cart full of scripts down Hollywood Boulevard again. About a half hour after I’ve settled into my bed with about a dozen television scripts, I start to actually not feel well and I’m certain it’s the Gods punishing me for using my disease as an excuse to get out of an awkward social situation.

I am not sure what to do about not feeling well on a Friday night by myself at home, because when I get sick it means I don’t have the use of my legs, and sometimes an arm or two, so I call my Almost Boyfriend and ask him to come over. He must have been playing it cool too because he seems to be home with nothing to do, so this ends up being one of the least exciting Hollywood nights I have ever spent, but it reminds me of what life would have been like if I had chosen another path: if I never moved to Hollywood and got a job in the movies, but stayed home in Ohio after high school and married the Editor of our High School newspaper. Tonight me and my Almost Boyfriend rent movies and eat just-okay Los Angeles Pizza, and both ignore our buzzing cell phones, and for a split second I forget this guy doesn't want to commit and my life seems almost refreshingly mundane. For one night I am just a girl who doesn’t feel so good who is starting a new job on Monday and lying in bed with her boyfriend watching movies. So many of my friends from my past lives tell me how exciting my life sounds, tonight I am reminded how I would give anything for a little bit of their boredom.

April 2, 2010

2010-04-01T23:58:00.000-07:00

Things to Do:

1. Birthday Sex.
2. Find a farm and muck out the horse stalls, for old time’s sake.
3. Start telling people I am the age I seem, not the age I actually am.

I get excited about my birthday because I grew up in a big family and that is the only day of the year I ever got any attention. My Mom used to give us a choice for our birthdays: dinner alone with her, dinner with the whole family, or a sleepover party. We usually chose the dinner with the family option, because if you chose to go out to dinner alone you would have seven siblings really angry with you, and the sleepover party option, well, I picked that option once, when I was in the eighth grade… All of my friends had to have their parents drive 45 minutes from the nearest real town, and 2.2 miles down a dirt road to my house. The road was very treacherous: the hills had nicknames, like “Jacob’s Ladder” because I think people stuck on them had a lot of time to kill waiting to be rescued. It’s actually quite picturesque, where I grew up, the road was called Falls Road because there was a beautiful waterfall on it, but because we had to work so hard as kids, I don’t think I ever really appreciated the quiet splendor of those woods. I don’t think a bunch of junior high school girls really appreciated it either, especially because my Mom’s idea of a special treat is pizzas we had to make from scratch, and she made us go to bed at 7 PM, with no talking allowed. Of course it’s nearly impossible to keep seven girls of that age quiet, and my Mom has the ears of a Hawk and she would yell up the stairs when she even suspected there was whispering going on. It was a good thing we were well-rested, however, because my Mom woke us up at 6 AM the next morning as it was my turn to muck out the horse stalls. Birthday or not, there was work to be done, and I have never forgotten the image of my junior high school friends cleaning up horse poop. That was the first and last sleepover party anyone ever chose for their birthday around my house.

This year I’m looking forward to a nice dinner out with my boyfriend, and I’m calling him that because he acts like my boyfriend and I heard it slip out of his mouth the other night when he was telling a friend who he was hanging out with. Last night he took me out for a pre-Birthday drink, and we started chatting with another couple at the bar. The women was ex-Hollywood, she had been a producer of some sort, and the man was Indian and wealthy, and it was my pre-Birthday so I told them the Aspiring Actor is not yet officially my boyfriend even though we have been dating exclusively for a while now. When they were saying goodbye, the man slipped me a bar coaster with this written on it: “Some men need an ultimatum. This is one of them.”

My thirtieth birthday party was the best birthday I have ever had. I had just gotten my first executive job in Hollywood, after a year and a half of being an assistant, I beat out over 200 people to work for the Comedy Director, and his Producing Partner called me to tell me the day before my birthday. It was a hard job to land, because it was on a Studio Lot with a bungalow, paid well, and I would have my own assistant. The Producing Partner was having a hard time hiring someone who was just an assistant when many of the applicants were already junior executives, but he finally took a chance on me, impressed with the fact that I have a Masters Degree and I write great notes. For my thirtieth birthday, I invited my roommate the Smelly Cab Driver, and all of my Hollywood friends, including my Old Boss who sexually harassed me. Fifi made me a cake, and we all went to Chez Jay in Santa Monica. It was perfect. Of course now I look back at the pictures and realize half of the people at that table no longer speak to me, including Nelly the Billionaire’s daughter, Sarah, Fifi, the Smelly Cab Driver and her new roommate who I call Eve because she tried to steal my job, and Jane who died in a car accident a year later. I was brimming with hope and happiness on that day, even though Fifi tried to rip everyone off when she calculated the bill, Nelly had a family emergency: her little sisters were kidnapped during dinner, so she had to run, and my roommate just smelled up the place, so there is a case to be made that this Best Birthday Ever thing might have just been in my head.

The worst birthday I ever had was when I was eight years old and my Mom served scallops for dinner. I’m allergic to scallops, but we didn’t have the luxury of refusing to eat our dinner when I was little, even on our birthday. I threw up all night long, and it was a spring snowstorm, so all I really remember is sitting on the ice cold floor of our only bathroom next to the toilet shivering, sick to my stomach. Many of the birthdays in between were just middling – East Coast Sarah threw a surprise party for me once but I had spent the day getting mad at all my friends for not hanging out with me that night, so I just felt like an idiot when they all shouted “Surprise!” The Sixteen Year Boyfriend liked sports, so I spent a few birthdays watching the final game of the NCAA – he also worked nights as a bartender, so I spent many birthdays waiting impatiently for him to wake up at 5 PM. It is impossible to please someone who puts as much importance on this day as I do, so I have a lot of sympathy for the people in my life who have tried.

I do not have great expectations for this birthday. Best case scenario, my (Semi) boyfriend proposes, telling me on bended knee that his resistance to being labeled my “boyfriend” was just because he would much rather be my fiancée. Worst case scenario, I get downgraded to friend and a big, warm hug replaces any hopes I had for a Birthday Kiss. The weird thing with this guy is, however, after spending months trying to get him to commit to me, I might be starting to kind of hope he never does. I’ve noticed in the last few weeks that it’s harder to find a job when I am not single. Most single guys in the industry do not want to do me any favors unless there is at least a small chance they will get laid. It’s no coincidence that I was at my most successful career-wise the three years I was broken up with the Sixteen Year Guy. Also I have a tendency to throw myself completely into my relationships: it takes a lot of energy to be as jealous and possessive as I am, and the round-the-clock surveillance of any boyfriend I may have detracts from my ability to focus on my job.

But for right now, I am jobless and in a very serious, semi-relationship, and for this one day of the year it’s nice to almost have a boyfriend. I may need cheering up because I’m worried that I won’t be able to find a permanent job in Development because the industry has changed so much since I first became a D-Girl, it has literally shrunk. After the Writer’s Strike, and the collapse of the economy, apparently Studios started realizing all of the money they were spending to develop projects might be wasted. At the Big Action Company, we had 40 projects in development. And most of them were on their sixth or seventh writers, yet none of these projects ever got made. I have always wondered when Studios would figure out that all of the money they pour into the Development machine was being thrown away. I still want to write, and I’m trying to think of a job that will allow me to write, which rules out the only thing I have ever done besides Entertainment, which is working in a restaurant. I don’t have too many other skills, I was a theater major in college, and I have worked in film or television since I left school. There is one gift left that I have never explored, however, but I always thought the skill would be put to use when I had a family of my own, and that’s my gift with children. So I’m thinking of becoming a Nanny, maybe the Nanny to some rich and famous Hollywood Power Couple. At least as a Nanny the morons I will be dealing with on a daily basis will be small children instead of grown ups with small egos.

I spend the morning of my Pre-Birthday looking into Nanny jobs and I’m pleasantly surprised by how much they pay. My semi-boyfriend texts me while I’m in the middle of sending out my fifth set of coverage for the day, which is how I am still paying my bills, to tell me he has a big surprise for me for my birthday, and I find a way to gracefully weave my ring size into the conversation so that he won’t feel awkward working that in. It feels silly to think someone would propose this early into a relationship, but there is always that friend to whom this magically happened who ruins it for the rest of us: in my case it is the Other Sarah, the only Sarah that remained my friend, who met and married a big Television Writer from the 80’s in three months. She was his fifth wife, a fact which gave me pause at the time, but it’s been a few years and they have two children now, and all his multiple marriages seem to have borne out was that he is insanely happy to have met such a stable and gorgeous woman. I met one of the ex-wives briefly, once, and she was a complete and total train wreck – with a neck brace and crutches and lacerations and all -- so I can understand why, when he met Other Sarah at a party he married her almost instantly.

My (semi) boyfriend comes over at midnight the night before my birthday with a small, silver box and my heart almost stops beating. The first thing I could think of was, I am going to faint if this guy proposes, and then the second was that I should really stop talking so badly about this guy to all my friends. But the small box is hoop earrings, and although they are lovely, I wonder if there should be an actual law against giving a girl over the age of 35 (even if she still looks 25) a small, silver box for her birthday that is not an engagement ring. There could have been serious health ramifications. I also wonder how much I could pawn these earrings for if this coverage stuff doesn’t pan out and if my new idea of being a Nanny to the rich and child-full masses in Hollywood is a bust.

I pretend I don’t hear my New Secret Boyfriend call himself my boyfriend about ten times as some sort of birthday present he didn’t have to pay for, because I am really worried about getting a job and I might need to sit on the proverbial fence with him a little while longer just to get some guys in this town to help me out a little. No matter how many of my sisters I bunked with as a child in the frozen tundra that was the 70’s in Massachusetts with no heat or running water, I still could never sleep the night before my birthday out of sheer excitement. For years when I was younger, the next town over, where I was bussed into to go to junior high, had a River Rat Race in which teams would race through brown water in canoes, and there was a little carnival, and it always fell around my birthday and I couldn’t wait to go to what I was convinced was the whole town’s celebration of my big day. No matter what, on the eve of my Birthday, I am tingly with excitement and I have that feeling I suppose kids feel on Christmas Eve, although our family never got presents growing up (unless you count 8 duffel bags with our names on them – most likely bought in case my mom got sick of any one of us and wanted to drown us in the river - as Christmas Presents) so I never had that feeling. Tonight, however, with my new earrings in my ears, I am not filled with excitement, rather my tummy has that familiar feeling that I am about to be really let down, in a lot of ways. This will forever be commemorated in my birthday mental scrapbook as the end of Birthday Excitement, I am thinking.

While I am trying to fall asleep I yank at the earrings absentmindedly and end up wearing one of them on my ring finger as I fall asleep. I didn’t do it on purpose, but the image of me lying there, asleep, and it seems I have tried to fashion the poor guy’s earrings present into a ring, I think sent the Semi-New Boyfriend over the edge and I barely heard him take his stuff and leave. I guess I will be waking up alone on my birthday morning this year. No friends, no family, no boyfriend, no job, just me and the stuffed bear the assistant girls gave me when I got fired and then hired back and then quit my last job. His name is Bob, named after the school bus driver I used to torment, and I will be spending my birthday curled up in bed with him, because at least he will never leave me. Too bad Bob doesn’t run a studio he could give me a cushy job based solely on my accomplishments and not the people in this town I have alienated. Bob doesn’t care, he is loyal until the end, just like me, I never leave anyone, they have all left me. Me and Bob. I think next year I will be one of those people who does not announce that it's their birthday. Bob knows its my birthday and that's all that matters anymore.

March 25, 2010

2010-03-25T22:32:00.000-07:00

Things to Do:

1. Talk Less.
2. Read More.
3. Write More.

I have read 26 scripts since 9:00 this morning, and my eyes are beginning to cross. I’m doing coverage for money now, until I find a real job, and I’m acutely aware that some poor screenwriter’s fate is in my hands as I evaluate their life’s work with a Vanilla Ice Blended in one hand and my television remote in the other. I’m using a pseudonym for my coverage, Shippy Shipwright, so that I might still be taken seriously as a real writer, and I’m thinking of adopting this pseudonym for other areas of my life as well, so when I screw up and blab someone’s deepest, darkest secret, Shippy gets the blame for it.

In order to make my rent next month, I need to do about 150 more sets of coverage, so I call one of the interns from the company I just left. She doesn’t know I quit, so I tell her I’m working from home for a few days. The intern has purple nail polish and bright hot pink curly hair, and she does really great coverage. She’s also a screenwriter, and her script, which is set on Mars, won a contest I helped arrange, which is how I found her.

The Intern comes to my apartment to collect some scripts from me, and we start chatting. After a few glasses of wine, I'm considering asking her to have a threesome with my Insignificant Other, but I don’t know if that’s too much to ask. The Aspiring Actor I have been dating (and not dating) for three months is quite obviously not just looking for the love of an okay woman: if he is going to commit to someone full time, he wants added benefits. I tried to break things off with him when I quit my job last week, but I couldn’t take all that change, so instead of gradually not returning his calls, I made up a new sexy girlfriend I met at Barry’s Boot Camp: Shippy Shipwright, who has seen his picture and can’t wait to meet him.

The Intern leaves before I can get up the courage to ask her for the threesome, but I have a feeling from the open mouthed kissed she gave me goodbye that it’s in the works. I check my email, and I see that my former Best Friend Sarah has accepted me as a friend on Facebook. I have not spoken to Sarah in three years. Or, rather, she has not spoken to me since she told me she was taking a two year break from our friendship because I am too self-destructive. We had one email exchange a year ago in which I told her I was going to our other friend Sarah’s husband’s book signing party, to which she was also invited, and she replied that she would therefore miss the event. Mistaking her response as a call for open dialogue, I replied with an historical account of the quick and unforeseen (by me) end to our friendship, and professed to her my deep sadness over the inexplicable nature of her departure. I never heard from her again. One would think that would deter me from opening up in such a manner but I open up every single day, to the supermarket checkout girl, the woman who does my bikini wax, it’s really gross the way I spill my guts to total strangers. I would take this Facebook activity to mean Sarah has finally decided she can’t live without me, but it is concerning to me that she has not added me as a friend, she has simply accepted me. I must have added her when I joined Facebook over two years ago, before I realized she had shunned me for life. I accept her for just long enough to peek at her page and realize she is engaged, and then I remove her.

I have mixed feelings about the whole Sarah situation. I can’t remember ever having a fight with her, so it was a complete shock when she dumped me. The inciting incident, as they would say in Screenwriter terms, was the article I wrote for a magazine outing Streets for having three balls, but I still have no idea why that concerned Sarah. My best guess, and I have had a long time to think about this, is that she was afraid eventually my poisonous mouth would turn on her. I would like to say all of Sarah’s secrets are safe with me, but I can’t guarantee this, so I suppose she did the right thing in excising me from her life. I certainly had enough dirt on her. I have no idea why I feel the need to share the recesses of my friends’ souls with other people, but it has been the sole cause of almost every friendship I have ever had ending. For a long time, every morning I would look into my bathroom mirror and say, “Mouth, please don’t hurt anyone today.” But my Mouth has a mind of its own, so eventually I stopped talking to myself in the mirror and became a writer.

The first piece of writing I ever got paid for was for an animated show that was going to be on VH1. The show was called "Left of the Dial", and it was going to be a music video with an animated story throughout. They basically hired me to write the animation, and the first one I wrote, for which I was paid the handsome sum of five hundred dollars, was for Madonna’s song Crazy for You. The story was a girl who is talking about her first crush, in high school, and how she used to sleep on his lawn and was a teenage stalker. The guy turns out to be gay, and the girl, we find out as the camera pans out, is now in jail. As usual, my writing is based on my own experience, as my first crush turned out to be gay, and I spent more than one night camped out on his lawn in High School. He was an actor, and I used to go to all his plays and sit in the front row, I brought him roses, and got his autograph even though we were in the same high school class. I don’t know why all the singing and dancing did not give me a clue as to his sexual orientation, but a few years after I moved to New York City to go to college, we found out we were in the same city and met for dinner and he told me he was gay. I think deep down I knew the whole time, and was just avoiding boys because I was so inexperienced: I didn’t have an orgasm until I was 26 years old, and that was just because Steve “Got Hit in the Head Once too Often by a Hockey Puck” Barnes – an editor for some music magazine -- got me stoned for the first time.

I also wrote a sketch for another VH1 show called “Girls Night Out”, which was a female sketch comedy show in the vein of Saturday Night Live. The sketch I wrote was called Marriage Tourette’s and it was about a girl who kept shouting out things about marriage on a date. She is trying to be cool but is obsessed with the idea of getting married, and she can’t help herself, by the end of the date she has the tablecloth wrapped around her head like a veil and they are carting her out of the restaurant while she screams: “The Bride Cuts the Cake!!” It’s draining culling all of my stories out of my own experiences, but if I write about other people’s experiences, it’s the same as blabbing their stories, I have discovered. Someday I will learn to start making things up, I guess that will be when the stories are all told.

I feel like going out tonight, to celebrate my bold decision to remove Sarah as a friend after she accepted my two year old friend request, so I call the Punk Rock Intern who has just left my house and invite her to my Producer Friend’s birthday party in Hollywood. She says she is swamped with all the work I gave her to do, and I tell her there is no rush even though most of the coverage is due in the morning, making a mental note to do it myself when I get home. I invited the Punk Rock Intern because I don’t know anyone else who needs to network, all my friends have reached their Hollywood Fake Friend quota years ago, and this girl is just hungry enough to not have to feign interest in meeting even one lit agent who could help her sell her screenplay. I invite the Aspiring Actor as well, because he is new in town and will still be impressed by the Industry chit chat, and as we all walk up the steps to the Foundation Room at the House of Blues, I feel nervous to see my old Development Friends, all of whom have undoubtedly heard about my unceremonious departure from my job.

Nobody, however, seems surprised that I left another job amidst a cloud of controversy, apparently I am destined to live a life of high drama, and I decide at some point in the evening to stop talking about the situation I am legally contracted not to talk about, and just dance with my Aspiring Actor Non-Boyfriend and the Punk Rocker Intern who has just overheard me talking about quitting and realized I called her to my house today to do coverage for a civilian. She seems nonplussed, and somehow flattered I would use such a ruse to rope her into doing coverage, and I am reminded how glamorous this career seems from the outside. She wouldn’t be so excited to be involved if she knew the price we all pay, how much energy it takes to keep all of these half-friendships to use to trade favors, and at the end of the evening I am too tired to have a threesome so I let my Non-Boyfriend make out with her before dragging him home to watch me write coverage all night.

At about four in the morning, I come across a script my good friend who owns a Production Company has sent me, he is willing to pay me eighty dollars a script to look at unsolicited submissions, and these I am tearing through quickly because unsolicited usually means bad, but one of them gives me pause as it is written by the gay guy I had a crush on all through High School. He is a semi-famous Actor now, he has been in countless television shows and is most popular for a cult classic movie he was in, in which he is entirely in drag. The script is set on a spaceship and takes place in the seventies, and it’s actually really brilliant. I have spoken to him occasionally over the years, and had no idea he was such a good writer. It’s hard to recommend the script as a movie, because it is dark and indie and expensive, but I know the guy so I give him “Consider” coverage and for this piece of coverage I use my real name. If I am going to stick my neck out for a script I might as well get that attention from the Gay Actor I have been seeking since High School.

The Gay Actor’s script inspires me to write a scene for the new screenplay I have been thinking of writing, which is about a moving company that specializes in moving girls out of bad or tired relationships, and as the Aspiring Actor’s phone blinks away into the night with texts from the Punk Rock Intern who has clearly taken my encouraging of their make-out session to mean I condone her poaching of my Semi-Boyfriend, I find myself wishing there was such a company and that they would come and move me out of this situation and into a better one. If I had to write coverage on this part of my life I would, most definitely give it a recommendation of “Poor,” and my comments would say that the main character seems lost, and our writer is not giving her any moments of joy. Nobody wants to go see a movie about a girl who can't break up with a guy who is not her boyfriend, especially when nobody else in her life gives a second thought about breaking up their friendship with her. This story is just pathetic, and I cannot as a now official script reader reccomend this project as a feature film.

My suggestion to the writer would be start at the beginning, on the farm, with the pigs named Ham, Bacon and Sausage, and the no heat and running water and churning butter or baking bread, and try to figure out where this girl came from, it will help explain a lot about where she is going. Otherwise consider cutting this main girl and focusing on the minor character, the fictional Shippy Shipwright who seems like she is having fun with her threesomes and her fitness classes and her smart studio coverage. I would tell this writer he or she needs to make this movie about scraping one's way from the bottom of something and finally reaching the top, a place at which she would finally obtain redemption and notoriety, and most importantly self-honesty. This is where I would like to be -- in the screenplay, and in my life. I wake up the Aspiring Actor and ask him to leave because I have a lot of work to do, not just on my script, but on my life.

March 18, 2010

2010-03-18T14:19:00.000-07:00

Things to Do:

1. Find a new job.
2. Find a new (real) boyfriend.
3. Find myself.

This morning I brought a box to work. It was just a plain old empty box, and when I got to the office I filled it with my stuff, said goodbye to the Iranian girl who is the only one in my company still talking to me, and walked out the door. I don’t know if anyone even noticed. My lawyer was the one who advised me to do this, she said the stress of working in such a hostile environment was making me sicker, and I suppose it was, but I hate to give my New Boss the satisfaction of winning our little war. As I walk down the path from our office building to my car, I realize I thought this would feel more liberating, as I’m quitting as opposed to getting fired, but instead I’m scared to death. I haven’t gotten paid yet for writing the television pilot, and who knows if they will ever pay me now that I have quit my job on them. I got a small check for the rights to the internet column, but that will barely cover my bills for the next two months. When my company decided to turn my internet column into a television show I thought that was my Big Break. Turns out it was just a small break. Another small break was the deal the Notorious Book Publisher offered me for the rights to the novelized version of my column: that was an even tinier break. I will be able to buy some new underwear and a magazine with that money. I always thought a book deal and a burgeoning television show would mean I would finally not have to worry about money for a while, but apparently I will never be rich.

Luckily I still have friends in Hollywood, and only five minutes after I put out the word I’m looking for a job, I have a job interview. They say love is all timing, and jobs are no different. I don’t have time to change, but thankfully I dressed up for my dramatic exit this morning, and I drive over the Hill to the Universal Lot hoping by some miracle I land this job. The job is to be Creative Executive for a man who produced The Sixth Sense, among other movies. I wonder if I should mention to him that when that movie came out I thought of making a short film called The Seventh Sense, about a guy who has heightened gaydar. The opening shot in the movie would have been a man on an exercise bike looking out over a city. Through all the windows in the neighboring buildings, he sees Gay men in various states of undress, and he says, predictably, “I see Gay People.” When I sit down with the Producer, though I immediately can see he does not have a sense of humor, so I keep my little spoof idea to myself.

I can tell this Producer is intelligent, and the beginning of the interview goes smoothly. He asks me if I can think of an obscure foreign film that would make a good remake, and that is an easy one for me. The title was The Spirit of the Beehive. It’s a Spanish film and my Dad took me to see it when I was young and I never forgot it. The movie is about a little girl who finds a man living in her back yard and she has convinced herself he is Frankenstein. The Producer looks up the movie on his computer and it has gotten five out of five stars on some website, so he seems pleased. We are getting along, this is going well. Until we talk about current movies and I fail to mention one of his movies that just opened. The meeting turns cold, he doesn’t even ask me to do notes, and I am rushed out the door without so much as a kiss on the second cheek. A one cheek kiss from a snooty, clearly two-cheek kisser – something he picked up at boarding school in Switzerland I suppose. And I am back in my 1993 BMW hoping my car makes it back over the hill to my Hancock Park apartment because I officially have no job, and no prospects for jobs, so I couldn’t afford it if this car breaks down. I wonder if I could break back into the hand-job business or do girls over thirty not get those kinds of jobs anymore??

A few days ago I would have called the Aspiring Actor immediately with news of this magnitude, but I’m trying to leave him alone. I keep having these weird flash-forwards, and seeing our relationship four years down the road or so. In four years, he has tried the acting thing, and failed, and suddenly is a lost little boy again, and I’m just the nagging girlfriend with no money (whom he thought had both money and potential) and whose biological clock is deafening. I don’t want to waste four more years of my life on a non- relationship that won’t end with at the very least, a baby. I have been down that long road. So I’m going to have to phase him out. Its funny we came so close to having a baby together, although it turned out I was not pregnant, and now we are going to barely be speaking as I initiate phase one of my special gradual ending to a non-relationship. No screaming and yelling, no begging and crying, just less and less contact until there is none. That’s what he gets for not defining this as a relationship. There are no rules.

The problem with my inability to end things is that I leave no room for new things to begin. So I am trying lately, in my own desperate way, to end things. I left my job, my non-boyfriend, and a potential lawsuit for the second time in my Hollywood career. It feels strange to arrive home before sundown, but I’m not there five minutes when my Big Boss calls. He has heard I quit, and wants me to come to his house to meet with him. The problem with this is, I have absolutely no ability to say no to anyone, and I am sure he will try to convince me to come back work. He will say I’m blowing my little feud with my New Boss out of proportion, and I need to take the afternoon to cool off and come back to work in the morning as if nothing happened. He’s not taking no for an answer, so I get back in my rickety car and drive to his house.

When I arrive, I realize I had nothing to worry about. My Big Ex-Boss is not trying to convince me to stay at his company, he just wanted to make sure I sign all the confidentiality agreements before I leave. I notice as well that I have not heard from my non-boyfriend, whom I have not texted since yesterday. It would be much easier to move on from things if these things did not want me so badly to move on. I remember my ex-boyfriend, the Sixteen Year Guy, told me once that he loves cornflakes but if someone forced him to eat cornflakes every day, he might not like them as much. He was trying to say, of course, that I should not force myself down people’s throats as much as I do, and I do have the tendency to do that. I am a lot like candy, I taste good but if you eat too much you get really, really sick.

I’m panicking about money, as I hear something strange rattling around in my car that I have not heard before, but word has gotten out to my friend who is a lawyer and married to one of the most powerful women in Hollywood, and her producing partner needs an assistant. This woman used to be an agent, and she represented some of the most famous women in Hollywood. I could wait around for another junior executive job to come around, but those are few and far between in Hollywood, and most of those jobs are filled from within, so I tell my friend I will interview with his wife’s Partner. I don’t know much about their company, except it is a vanity company for a Famous Female Actress, and my friends’ wife is notorious for making all of her assistants cry on a daily basis. I’m hoping because I’m her husband’s friend, and not working directly for her, that she won’t make me cry every day. In my twenties I used to go into my bartending job every night with eyes swollen from crying over my tumultuous relationship, so much so that my bar-back used to ask me in broken English if I had bee stings on my eyes. I am older now and cry less, I would like to keep it that way.

My interview is in the morning, so I need to go to bed early, thank goodness for Ambien and the exhaustive nature of being a psychological wreck, because I am dead tired and feel like I’ll fall asleep quickly. It feels odd not reading a few scripts before I go to sleep, so I decide to catch up on some scripts sent to me by friends who want notes, and help getting an agent. Unfortunately I am falling asleep by page one of someone’s script. I don’t think I am going to be helpful to anyone today, and as I am drifting off I think of a new idea for a spoof. There is a young woman, pedaling her exercise bike as she looks out over her town. All over the city, she sees people bent over their desks looking at bills, on the side of roads next to their broken down cars, and at bars tipping bartenders in change. The tag line is, "I see poor people." It's a little depressing, but it's real life.

March 12, 2010

2010-03-13T16:04:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1.   Give up on dream of having a child.
2.   Give up coffee.
3.   Start doing yoga again.

I have been thinking of names for my unborn child since I was five years old. My tastes have evolved since then, so it’s no longer Olive or Pickle: I have become more of a fan of names that won’t get my child beat up after school, because if that sort of thing is hereditary, the kid already has the deck stacked against him. For years I daydreamed about having a brooding, big-nosed, green eyed kid with my ex-boyfriend, the guy I dated for sixteen years, but I lost many hard-fought battles over the subject, and ended up in Planned Parenthood more than once. They should have a frequent customer card there: some sort of points/reward system for girls with no backbone.

The last time I was in Planned Parenthood I went with the East Coast Sarah, and she was pregnant too: we had co-abortions, which were kind of like a couples massage but without the soothing feeling, soft music and pleasing aroma. I hadn’t planned on having that abortion, in fact I had told my family and my Boss that I was having a kid, with my boyfriend of eight years, and that we were very happy about it. But in truth my boyfriend wasn’t ready for a child and in the end I couldn’t saddle him with any more problems than I already had. Dating me was hard enough. They screwed it up though, the nice folks at Planned Parenthood, and I had flown home to Ohio for a Black Tie Dinner in honor of my Dad, and was sitting at a fancy table with most of my brothers and sisters, all dressed up, when I realized something was wrong. The whole thing was a nightmare, and today as I sit at my desk staring at the pregnancy test I just bought at the pharmacy, I am hoping I never have to go through anything like that again.

There should be a group you can join on Facebook that counsels you about how to break the news to a guy you have only been dating a few months, someone who has adamantly declared he doesn’t want to be in a relationship, that you might be pregnant. The group could give you helpful hints, like how to open the conversation, and how to protect the breakable items in your apartment from being thrown against a wall. Mostly I would like to know how to keep him around afterwards, because I am about to lose my job and I hate change, so I don’t think I could take losing my non-boyfriend too.

We are having lunch today, my non-boyfriend and me, and I stick the pregnancy test in my green 1998-era Miu Miu purse in case I am inspired to find out for sure in between the main course and dessert if I am having the Aspiring Actor’s baby. I have been holding on to the test for two days because I’m nervous to know the truth, and because things are so dicey for me at work I’m not sure I could take the stress of another life-changing event. The Aspiring Actor is affectionate and attentive, as usual, but now I can’t help thinking what an affectionate and attentive Dad he would be, and wondering if we will still be splitting the check when the kid is born. I have news for him: my child is not paying for his own chicken fingers.

It’s funny how in life I can’t keep my mouth shut about anything, my psychiatrist is probably right, I am addicted to talking, it’s like a drug for me and I think actual endorphins are released in the back of my head when I tell a story, but today I can’t seem to get the words out that I might be pregnant. The Aspiring Actor looks extremely cute, he is wearing his glasses and it’s chilly out in Los Angeles so he has on his black wool overcoat that literally makes my knees weak. I keep running the conversation over and over in my head, and it never ends well. When we met he told me he wanted a family, and he is from a traditional, immigrant family of his own, so it makes sense he would want that, but there is a side of him that has so much growing up to do, and as we finish our lunch I have the queasy feeling in my stomach that I am not sure I want to be the one who makes him grow up faster than he wants to. It’s a good thing I have Planned Parenthood already programmed into my phone.

I haven’t taken the Test yet but I’m almost positive I know the result, so I make the call on my way home. I can fit the procedure in next weekend, I decide, as I look on my phone to see my calendar. It’s not how I wanted to spend a Saturday in the spring in Los Angeles, but then again not too many things in my life have turned out the way I wanted them to. As I am hanging up the phone, the Aspiring Actor sends me a text telling me how cute I looked at lunch. Sigh. The things I do for Almost-Love.

Back at the office, I have a pitch scheduled with two writers who seem like nice enough guys, but they have brought props: mini-buildings and a skyline of a city, and their script is called America Unplugged, and it involves terrorists shutting down the power grid in the U.S. It’s actually a good script, but very eighties/Die Hard-ish, and I am trying to get my Boss to consider more modern movies. The guys are affable, and we all chat for a while after their pitch, and make plans to go out for drinks someday. The invited me a party next weekend, but I have the abortion so I have to decline. It’s a gift I have, maybe my other gift besides my ability to connect to kids, to make friends with people instantaneously. I have noticed that the Aspiring Actor does not have this ease with people, and I think this is going to make it even harder for him to break into the Los Angeles acting scene.

I finish the first draft of the television pilot about my life by the end of the day, and send it to my good friend and moral compass Adam, because he is a great d-boy, gives amazing notes, and he won’t judge me for illicit content. As I’m shutting down my computer for the day, my New Boss passes by my office to have a chat with the office Assistant whose desk is right in front of my doorway. She talks loudly, which is not typical as she usually speaks in a whispery, passive aggressive tone, and tells the Assistant my Big Boss just found out he has to go out of town for a few days so she will be taking over the television project in his stead. Great, I am carrying an unwanted child and I have to turn in a draft of a television pilot about my life to a woman who detests me. I don’t know which situation is worse.

When I get back to my apartment, I realize there is no hot water, and all I’ve been thinking about all day is taking a long, hot shower when I get home. I’m dirty, and I have a drinks to go to in a while, so I take a cold shower and it reminds me of my childhood, when we didn’t have hot water, or heat in our house for that matter, we used a woodstove to heat one room in our huge house, and there was a hole in the floorboards in my room that you could uncover to let a little heat up from the stove below. We would put rocks in our beds covered in cloths that had been on the woodstove to heat our beds, but that only lasted a few minutes and then we just froze all night long. The first thing I am doing when I get my first check for writing the pilot is moving to a nicer apartment, and the next thing I am doing is looking into how much it costs to go to a sperm bank. I’m tired of worrying about ruining some guy-who-is-going-to-break-my-heart-anyway’s life, and although single motherhood is not ideal, at least my kid will have hot water and heat growing up.

Just as I am about to leave for my drinks, the Aspiring Actor calls to say he is around the corner and has a surprise for me. He remembered that I used to play drums as a kid, and he went out and bought me a pair of drumsticks, and a drum pad. I give him a proper mushy thank-you kiss before I run off to my drinks, and as I drive away I have a warm, fuzzy feeling in the pit of my stomach that replaces the sick feeling I’ve had all day. It’s been a long time since someone has done something that nice for me, and although he doesn’t know the nice thing I am about to do for him, I am hopeful he sticks around long enough to see that I there is nothing I won’t do for someone I almost love.

March 9, 2010

2010-03-09T14:14:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1. Start pilfering office supplies.
2. Buy raw pork so when I am on Ambien at night maybe I eat that instead of calling up ex-friends to beg for their friendship back.
3. Start building good character. It’s never too late.

When I was in Junior High School in Massachusetts, I had a fight scheduled with another girl almost every day after school. Girls would constantly ask me to fight them, I guess it was because I was really small but I had a big mouth. I only won one of these fights, and that was because I hit a girl in the mouth who had braces and she started bleeding and stopped fighting me. All of the Tough Girls at that school hated me, mostly because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut during class; they slashed the tires on my Mom’s car when she came to see me play the drums in a band concert and I couldn’t walk to the local library after school without fearing for my life. I used to hide on the path between the school and the library until all the Tough Girls left for the day, and I remember distinctly one day a tall girl who was about 16 and still in the eighth grade chasing me down the street while wheeling a baby carriage, cursing at me with a lit cigarette in her hand. It was a rough place, a small factory town, and we lived in the next town over, a place too small to have a Junior High School. We moved away after my eighth grade year and I came back once to visit my best friend and go to the Annual Town Fair. Even though years had passed, I got followed around that day by some Tough Girl still angry at me for wisecracking at her during Science Class.

I am an adult now, and no longer get into fist fights with girls, but much of the conflict in my life still stems from my Big Mouth, and Hollywood is a lot like Junior High School. Every day lately, at some point, I start to get the same queasy feeling I got when I was younger and the end of the school day approached: the feeling that sometime later that day, I was going to get the crap beat out of me. Only one spunky Iranian girl at work has the guts to talk to me, everyone else has been instructed not to speak to me because my Big Boss is afraid I will sue the company for firing me for having Multiple Sclerosis. I had no intention of suing when this first happened, I was happy to learn I still had a job, but the New Producing Partner is now on a mission to make my life so miserable I will quit, and once again I am being called out to the playground to fight someone twice my size.

So I hired a lawyer, and by hired I mean she will get paid if we really sue, because I have no money, although I did consider offering a barter: services rendered for a few pairs of expensive designer shoes, which I only own because my Gorgeous Cousin used to work at Saks Fifth Avenue and on Double Discount days we could buy things for 70% the normal price. The lawyer is kind and gentle, like a very intelligent Aunt, and she doesn’t wear designer shoes so I will have to pay her real money at some point, and is very well schooled in matters of workplace discrimination. I had no idea I have a disability policy at work which means I would get paid part of my salary if I leave because I am too sick to do my job, but I don’t make very much money so part of my salary is not enough to live on even if I do decide to quit. I still have no intention of suing my company, but it’s nice to have someone who is looking out for my best interests. I don’t know why I don’t want to just take them to court for firing me and then making my workplace a nightmare after hiring me back, but I have never been litigious, I think I want people to like me too much to really fight back like that. My Big Boss seems upset that I am even talking to a lawyer, however, which is making me think I should just sue so I can leave this bad situation since I am making enemies either way.

Despite all the acrimony surrounding me at work, I am busier than ever trying to develop the few projects I have on my slate, including the book I stole from my friend which was the first project I brought in, working on the television show we have set up based on my internet column, and trying to find new projects for my company to buy. I have a feeling the events of the past few weeks would magically be forgotten if I found a project for my Boss to direct, he has been stuck lately working on old, tired scripts that will never go forward. He really is a genius director, a visionary, but he is older and has no idea what is current or fresh, and he hasn’t had a great movie in a long time. So I bide what little time I have left at this job by reading 25 scripts a day and going through old pieces of coverage, desperate to find a way to make myself indispensible.

I cancel my lunch today and go see my psychiatrist, because I feel like I’m going to explode from all of the stress at work and trying to get the Aspiring Actor to commit to a relationship. I’ve been seeing my psychiatrist for the past few years, on and off, he is a gentle man, older and not bad looking, he has the demeanor of someone who belongs on a nice-sized boat, he is always relaxed and he soothes me. As I approach his office, I hope he doesn’t forget about our appointment, as he does sometimes, and when that happens I am immediately transported to Concord, Massachusetts, and the day when I was five years old and I was standing on a staircase when my Dad stood at the front door and told us he was leaving my Mom. I’m aware lots of kids have been through divorce, but my Dad moving to Boston and leaving my six brothers and sisters for the majority of the time with my Mom was more like leaving a cute brood of baby mice with a big old snake. We were, most definitely, going to be eaten for dinner.

My psychiatrist has managed to remember our appointment, but I always get the feeling during our meetings that he is overwhelmed by my story, and very concerned about me. I think he’s a great psychiatrist but I’m pretty sure he is judging me for many things I say during our sessions. Once I told him I’m fortunate because I’m not addicted to anything, and he replied, yes you are, you are addicted to talking. I was kind of offended, because wasn’t I supposed to be doing all the talking in my psychiatrist’s office? Today I tell him what happened at work and he needs to take a sip of water, he is that disturbed. He has always been very interested in my sex life, because he undoubtedly thinks I have too much of it, and I tell him lately I have pretty much narrowed this area in my life down to one guy, and he seems relieved. I don’t tell him that I have committed to someone who doesn’t want to commit to me; I think that would be too much for him to take today.

The first draft of our pilot script based on my internet column has come in, so I rush back to the office to read it, as somehow it is not showing up on my Kindle. When I get to work I close my office door and tell the assistant to hold my calls and he looks at me like I am nuts, apparently he is the office assistant but he doesn’t work for the Story Editor, so I will have to answer the phone while I am reading the pilot script that might pluck me from obscurity and make me enough money to leave this thankless job. It only takes me fifteen minutes to read, because I read freakishly fast, and I am underwhelmed by the job the Girl with the Sweet Studio Deal did on it. It’s not funny, it’s kind of sad actually, to watch this d-girl spin her wheels, and I think the Writer missed all the glamour. Sarah and I have been to some really swanky Hollywood Parties in our day, and all this girl writes about is my quest to find love and success, and my attempt not to be a whore in a whorish job.

I’ve decided not to be depressed about how I’m portrayed in the pilot, because I have a feeling I am actually a bigger loser than I originally suspected, and maybe this writer is just perceptive enough to have picked up on that at our drinks, and I think there is a certain cinematic quality to being at the true bottom of the barrel – I would never want to float somewhere in the middle, unnoticed, and I’m uncomfortable at the top. My Boss has read the pilot as well, and he calls me just as I am about to leave the office to tell me his thoughts. I can see he is trying to be gentle, but he obviously doesn’t like it either, and he tip-toes around the sensitive subject, trying not to trash my life. He is clearly aware of the fact that I could still sue his company. Finally he asks me if I would try writing a draft, just so he can see what I was really going for when I wrote the internet column. We don’t talk about money, naturally, because things like that don’t happen to me, but he says if they like it they will pay me for it and I can be a writer and producer on the show.

I cancel my dinner with my friend who only eats meat, our soft-standing weekly Korean Barbeque, even though I am in desperate need of counsel, and stay at the office to begin working on my television pilot. I decide what is most important is that it is funny, and I am tired and nervous today, so funny doesn’t come easily. What I find the most challenging is deciding how much of myself to spill onto the pages, I personally like honest writing the most but I am dubious as to how much an audience really cares that I almost became a prostitute and that a Famous Actress’ producing partner’s dog ate my shoes. Mine is a tiny life, and would make an even tinier television show, so I need to make my stories bigger, and it’s exhausting to open up like this, it makes everything hurt more, so I pack up my Kate Spade tote bag and go meet the Aspiring Actor for a drink because I know he will make me feel better; he has a way of steering the conversation towards himself and that makes me forget about my troubles.

After spending my lunch hour talking about myself to my psychiatrist, and part of my day reading about myself, I am more than happy to sit at our favorite bar for hours and listen to my non-boyfriend talk about his own problems. He speaks at length of his decision to leave his corporate job to become an actor, and even as he is crushing my dreams of meeting a normal guy with a real job who can take care of a family, I am happy he is holding my hand the whole time and grateful to have something else to think about other than turning my life into a television show that millions of people will like. As we are heading home at the end of the night, my lawyer calls me. Apparently she doesn’t keep normal hours, and I like that in a lawyer. She asks me to reconsider staying at my job, telling me it might make me sicker to stay in a hostile environment, but I look over at my soon-to-be-unemployed non-boyfriend and I tell her I need to keep my paycheck for a while. I grew up in a hostile environment, I can handle strife, my New Boss is not going to hit me in the face every day after work, so this life is still an improvement over my old life. I realize that if this were still junior high, and people still held scheduled fights in the playground after school, there would be a line around the block of girls who want to fight me: the Sarahs, Fifi, and Nelly the billionare's daughter would all love to get a blow in, but nobody beats me up more than myself, and I have my non-boyfriend drop me at my car because I need to go home and start thinking of a way to make all of this funny.

February 25, 2010

2010-02-25T13:39:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1. Hire a Lawyer.
2. Finish Manuscript so I have the money to hire a lawyer.
3. Change workplace Weather Report on our website: New Weather Report is: “Vendetta Forming”

I have not called in sick to work in years, maybe ever, but two weeks ago I was having a bad day, my left arm has been going numb for a while now, it crawls all the way up my cheek and lasts for a few minutes, and I finally just called in sick. The day before I called in sick I was in a meeting with my Boss and a Super Star singer/actress and my arm fell asleep and the numbness crept up the side of my face. The Singer was nice about it, but I figured maybe I should rest, see a doctor, and for just one day, admit I am sometimes sick. I’m sitting at the doctor with an IV of steroids in my arm when my Boss’ new producing partner calls my cell phone. She has only been at our company for three weeks, and her voice has a phony ring of concern as she asks me if maybe in light of my recent flare-up of Multiple Sclerosis I should consider taking some time off. By time off, she goes on to say, she means a few months, and then I should get a job somewhere else. I can barely lift my head from the pillow in the hospital room as I gasp, “Are you firing me?” She sighs, as if this is the hardest thing she has ever had to do. “I just don’t think you can handle this job,” she says faux-sadly.

There is a flurry of activity that includes my Mother, who is a right-wing politician, calling my Boss and demanding to know if her daughter just got fired for having Multiple Sclerosis, and a letter being delivered to my hospital bed signed by no less than eight lawyers calling the whole event a “mistake”. Hospital beds, lawyers, concerned mothers, panicked Bosses, none of this is familiar territory for me and my prevailing thought is what could I have done to make this Producer hate me so much? I will admit I don’t like her much, but I didn’t know she knew that, and I was just getting used to having a job again, a real Hollywood job with buck slips and business cards and my own little office. Even though my Boss hired me back as soon as I called to tell him what happened, I have a feeling nothing is ever going to be the same for me at this job again.

My Boss hired his new producing partner after the untimely death in a motorcycle accident of his old producing partner. I knew the first time I met her that we would clash, she is used-to-be-pretty, never smart, and successful only in that she is best friends with our studio-head’s wife. She has produced a few movies, which were adaptations of novels, and ironically enough they are about the Black experience, I say ironically because I am positive this woman has never had a conversation with a Black person in her entire life. The first week she worked here, we were best friends. We gossiped like girlfriends and I didn’t mention to her that I am positive her successful, absentee husband is gay. I met her sixteen year old daughter and instantly liked the daughter better, she has pink hair and is more mature than her mom. Somewhere around week two, things went sour between us. Her high-pitched, whiny voice started to grate on my nerves, and it was obvious even as a newly anointed Story Editor, I could do her job in my sleep. I noticed she didn’t know writers, hadn’t read too many scripts, and her job seemed to consist of having lunches with other powerful Hollywood women. All of the respect I had for my Boss went out the window the more I realized what a complete moron he had hired as a Producing Partner.

To be fair, I can understand why my Boss brought her on. She is extremely good at Hollywood politics, and we’ve been having a hard time navigating our studio deal. He needed someone who plays the game of Hollywood around, or he was going to have to pay our salaries out of his own pocket. I have been to my Boss’ house, he lives a lavish lifestyle: there is no way he is going to pay for his staff himself. The New Producing Partner is docile and meek, and I suppose my Boss thought he could control her easily while she lunched her way across Hollywood. The problem is, she is deceptively passive, and during her third week at our company I walked in on her whispering on the phone about my Boss and our eyes met, and it was all over for me. Apparently she was having some sort of secret friendship with an ex-friend of my Boss. It’s comforting to see that very accomplished adults still behave like grade-schoolers. Within an hour I could see a vendetta against me forming and office doors were slammed shut and suddenly none of the assistants were looking me in the eye.

I’ve always had this problem. I can’t seem to lay low, as much as I need this job and wanted to start back in Hollywood with a clean slate. I knew I was overqualified to be an assistant again, so flying under the radar was imperative at this company, and I have done the opposite of that: sleeping with my Boss’ Producing Partner before he met a tragic End, and now inadvertently alienating the new Producing Partner by accidentally walking in on some clandestine phone call. I don’t even know what they were talking about on the call, I just know my New Boss looked mortified, and, in addition to the fact that I am like an Octopus and I wear my emotions on my sleeve and could not hide the way I felt about her, suddenly made my future at this company is uncertain at best.

The two weeks since I was fired and then immediately rehired have been awkward for me at work. There seems to be a division of people in the office, the ones who are afraid of the Producing Partner, and the ones who are not. A tattooed, choppy-haired Iranian girl who is our receptionist is the only person who acts as if some egregious slight of the Americans with Disability Act has not taken place here. Personally I would love if none of this ever happened, but I am now an official damn liability at a company. Again. My Boss is remaining as neutral as possible, well aware that the future of his Production Company is at stake. One big lawsuit from me and I guess his company and possibly his reputation is at risk. It just doesn’t look good in either Court – Public Opinion or the Law one – for the poor little M.S. girl to get fired for missing a day of work.

The Producing Partner is now officially not speaking to me. At one point she walked by my office when I was mid-seizure and writhing around on the floor and she just looked down at me distastefully. She has shrewdly promoted an intern to take over assistant duties for me so now all I have to do is the real job of a story editor, which is exactly what I wanted to begin with, but I am suspicious, I have a feeling taking away one’s duties, however mundane, is akin to firing them in some capacity. It’s a testament to my potent personality that I have this big an enemy in this short a time. I’m confused as to whether I should fight back, wonky arm and all, or just keep quiet and let this all blow over.

So, I decide to dress up because my Aspiring Actor Guy is coming back from India today, and meet him for a drink so he can tell me, once again, that he is not ready for a relationship and then he will proceed to do about ten things in a row which scream long term relationship. I tell him all about the Private Investigator my insurance company has sent to follow me around to make sure I don’t make a claim against them in the future, and I even point out the nice Mexican guy who is seated at the end of the bar with the mandatory Corona in his hand who taps his hat at us as if he is right out of some USA Network television show. I am pretty sure the Mexican Guy is my PI, but then again, now that my Boss is afraid I will sue my company for firing me for being sick, the company could be sending guys to watch over me for that reason as well.

I am too busy at drinks trying to figure out whether the Aspiring Actor Guy met anyone on his trip to care what the Mexican Guy at the end of the bar is watching for, and its not lost on me that I hooked up with Little Boy Blue when the Aspiring Actor was away which would make me either a hypocrite or completely in charge of the situation. He seems appalled at my recent work complications, and I am aware his quest for a girl with no drama will probably continue after this evening. While we are finishing up our drink and deciding where to sleep tonight, my Boss calls. He is syrupy sweet and wants to know if it has been difficult working with his New Producing Partner. Since half the office is no longer speaking to me, I can honestly say it has been peaceful at work of late, but tense, and I tell him I feel like I have been caught in a bad dream, I go on and on until I realize he has been watching the Olympics the whole time and not listening to a word I said.

I don’t know why I talk to Hollywood folks like they are real people, everyone has their own agenda and I have just become my Boss’ new problem, with my gimpy walk and checkered past he is surely regretting hiring me and wondering how to get rid of me. I guess I should meet with the job placement girl again and think of a graceful exit strategy for this job, I will never win against a semi-attractive, half-smart, popular Producing Partner who is best friends with all the wives in Hollywood. The Aspiring Actor seems to be looking for a way to get rid of me also, as he talks about more trips he has planned to far away lands and the Mexican Guy who follows us home seems to be the only person in my life not trying to ditch me.

When I arrive home at 3 in the morning, there is a package waiting for me on my apartment doorstep. Inside are about fifty pages of a confidentiality agreement, I don't know why it takes fifty pages to try and scare me into keeping the events of the past two weeks quiet, but the cover letter makes it clear that being able to keep my job is a trade, and I notice there is a second option in the letter, a few months severance in exchange for my silence. It's tempting to cut and run, get a new job and leave behind the huge mess that has been created for me at work. But unfortunately for everyone: the Aspiring Actor, my Boss, the New Producing Partner, I have an amazing ability to stick things out. I was with the same guy for sixteen years, my committment to bad situations is unparalleled. They are going to have to try a lot harder than this to get rid of me.

February 11, 2010

2010-02-12T00:57:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1. Suggest to my new semi-boyfriend that he call me his Flapdoodle, because any title is better than none.
2. Invent a device that tests my breath for alcohol content before it unlocks my computer keyboard so that I don’t drunk-email semi-boyfriend in India.
3. Sell my television project to my company for so much money Computer Guy will want to be my boyfriend because he will realize he can eventually quit his job to become an Actor and live off of my new riches.

I have never had a baby, but I wrote a script once. I checked myself into a room at the Standard Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles to finish it, and handed the script to my best friend and Literary Manager Sarah when I was done. In my life, I have checked into various establishments before for help: hotels and hospitals, voluntarily and otherwise, but the Standard has far superior food to them all. I don’t know how to write anything that’s not about me, so I wrote a script called Forever Yours about a girl who stalks all her boyfriends, and it never went out as a spec because Sarah’s boss told me the main character was too creepy. I think the word stalker gets overused in modern lexicology: to be honest I don’t see what’s wrong with spending every second with someone once you know you love them. My new almost-boyfriend the Computer Guy/Thespian does not, however, subscribe to this philosophy and is going on a trip to India for a month for work. He is clearly not completely aware of my excruciating abandonment issues; meaning, I make it excruciating for anyone who tries to abandon me. I want to press my face up against the glass of his airplane to say my final Goodbye to him, but FAA regulations preclude this, so I am forced to make a colorful sign and stand woefully at the window of the divider between the main terminal and the gates at LAX while he endeavors to make his way to his airplane. The sign says “Don’t Forget Me” but I think it would be difficult for anyone to forget me, especially since I deliberately spilled an entire bottle of my Chanel perfume into his suitcase this morning.

We have only been dating a month, but I have had three vodka-Red Bulls, so I text him that I love him as soon as he is boarding his plane. It’s amazing how nervous laughter actually does translate in text message form, because his response is “love ya too babe” which, of course, commits to nothing. I head home immediately to begin an onslaught of email missives the likes of which this guy has never seen before. Forever yours, don’t forget me. Love, D-Girl. He has no chance, this docile, young studious lad. He has encountered a force bigger than himself and decisions have been made about his life far into the future. He should not fight it and just enjoy the ride. I’ve heard one may lose weight in India because the food goes right through you, so for this reason and my aforementioned stalker mentality I decide to look up flights to India and possibly join my new friend in a faraway land that hopefully has forgiving lighting and no laws against the aggressive pursuit of true love.

When I was a kid, we moved five times before I was in the first grade. And I changed schools three more times before I finally got to settle in somewhere in the tenth grade when I followed the migration of most of my older brothers and sisters who all eventually ran away from the farm to go live with my Dad in Ohio. I suppose this is part of the reason I date people like a suction cup, stayed with the same guy for sixteen years, hung on to toxic best friends until they had to chew off their own arms to get away from me, and am currently fixating on a guy who has just flown halfway across the world and does not want to be in a relationship. Unstable, chaotic, temporary: it all feels like home to me. Throw in a little empty flattery, manipulation and some blatant lies and it’s like a Christmas card from my mother and I’m six years old again and crying on the bathroom floor while the person I’m supposed to trust most in the world berates me through a locked door.

The Computer Guy, who, to my great dismay, is becoming more and more The Aspiring-Actor Guy, hit the Insecure/Hot Chick lottery when he hooked up with me, and he’s being sucked into my vortex of dependency. I hear from him quite a lot even though he’s in Bangalore and probably sleeping with every blonde tourist he bumps into on the dance floor while on his weekend excursions to exotic places like Goa. I’m making him a painting for his eventual return even though I can’t paint but I’m hoping he will find my lack of artistic prowess adorable. I mess up the first painting I attempt and throw it out in the garbage dumpster next to my apartment building and start again, I have a month to finish this and I want to try and make it pretty. It’s not a picture, it’s a quote I have found that talks about being yourself, and I think my new semi-boyfriend will like what it has to say, even if it looks like an eight year-old painted it. I’m a bit wary to give it to him only because I have made these paintings for a few of my friends before, and every friend for whom I have made a painting, has dumped me. Despite this Curse of the Paintings, I paint on, determined to make a permanent impression on, at the very least, this guy’s bare apartment walls.

It’s only been a few days since the Aspiring Actor has been away on business, and the India Stalking Trip will have to wait because things have become hectic at work as my Boss is realizing I can handle more and more responsibilities. Suddenly I’m doing the work of six employees: tracking specs, meeting with agents, developing projects, reading eighteen scripts a day, and running the desk of one of the most eccentric Directors in Hollywood who has a notebook obsession and likes his folders color-coded. It helps a bit not to have to worry about finding a boyfriend now that I have set my sights on a boy who has apparently skipped the country on me, and I notice I’m the only girl in the office who is taking home 35 scripts to read over Valentine’s Weekend.

There is more and more talk around the office of me leaving my job because my company is about to close the deal on my television show, but I notice most of the talk comes from my nemesis Lorna McSlutchen who quite obviously wants my job. Lorna is not going to get rid of me that easily, however, I don’t like change and I am afraid of real success. I suppose I’ll quit my assistant/story editor job when the show airs and I’m impossibly famous, but I’ve worked out here long enough to know that could be a while away, if ever. Meanwhile I just need to make myself indispensable to my Boss so he doesn’t think he is doing me a favor by letting me pursue my writing full-time.

After a long day of juggling four jobs at work, and making sure my Boss’ dinner companion arrives before he does so he can show up on his cell phone and look more important than his guest, I pull my old BMW up to the front of my Korea Town apartment building and I see a homeless man has set up a little cardboard house for himself right next to our garbage dumpster. It looks quite cozy, actually, and he has taken my rejected painting out of the trash and it is the sole decoration for his new humble abode. When I go inside and check my email only to see I suddenly have not heard from my new possible life-partner all day I realize I am not going to find Home with his guy, he is just attracted to my potential right now, and that’s a sucker’s bet, nobody ever lives up to their potential. I decide to take Little Boy Blue up on his offer to go have a drink, and change my clothes quickly and go down to my car. On the sidewalk I take back the reject painting the Homeless man had been displaying, and exchange it with the real painting I had originally made my non-boyfriend, and the Homeless man says thank you in a quiet and tired way; he sounds the way I feel, probably because I have always been homeless in some sense of the word.

When I meet Little Boy Blue, he claims he has broken things off with the stripper and finally wants to pursue things with me, and I’m too demoralized and exhausted to be coy so I take him home with me and sleep with him. I am going to have to tell The Aspiring Actor that as much as he treats me with indifference just like my mother treated me as a child which feels all familiar and warm and cozy to me, he is not winning me over with the anti-commitment rhetoric and leaving me for long trips to smelly countries. As I’m walking Little Boy Blue down to his car later, we pass by the Homeless guy and Little Boy Blue says he really likes the painting prominently displayed in the Homeless guy’s cardboard home. I don’t tell him I made it, but I have a new idea for a painting and I think Little Boy Blue is really going to like it. That’s what addicts do, they switch one addiction to another, and so, apparently I am swapping out men in my life – the Aspiring Actor for a Famous Folk Singer’s Son. I am always holding onto something for dear life: a man, a job, a best friend, my goal of being a writer, the idea of having my own home, having my own family... Maybe that Homeless guy has it all figured out. Maybe the best idea would be to let it all go, and go live in a cardboard box with my stack of scripts and a pad of paper and a pencil. As I watch the taillights from Little Boy Blue's car fade away sitting on my stoop next to the Homeless guy I wonder if I am already and finally, home.

February 10, 2010

2010-02-10T14:51:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1. Stop borrowing money from ex-boyfriend.
2. Get jewelry back from the Beverly Hills Pawn Shop.
3. Sell old clothes to the second-hand store.

I’ve always been poor and only recently has that started to really bother me. The summer after my Senior Year in High School, I moved home from Ohio to Keene, New Hampshire because my Dad had married one of his students and they wanted the apartment to themselves. I worked two jobs that summer, at Papa Gino’s and at Friendly’s. I wore polyester uniforms for both jobs, and rode a bicycle to work. I saved up almost 500 dollars to bring to college with me in New York City in the Fall, the bulk of which consisted of coins wrapped in paper rolls, and that seemed like a lot of money. So it’s hard for me when my rich friends talk about troubles and pain, I know I could be really happy if someone else blow-dried my hair for me every day. I just know it.

My Boss finally approached me at work about buying my Internet column to develop it into a television show. Because I talk in my Internet column about being a terrible negotiator, I have a feeling my Boss has the upper hand in this conversation. He talks about being on a limited budget, how it will be a cable show and those pay less, but since my life is R-Rated our options are limited. My eyes glaze over during talks of monetary reimbursement, as I’m convinced I will never be rich, but I’m at full attention when my Boss talks about his vision for the show, which is a kind of Mary Tyler Moore Show, set in Hollywood, except Mary sleeps with everyone. He says on my show it would be as if Mary hooked up with Lou Grant at a party and it’s awkward at work the next day, and I suddenly wonder if he knows I was sleeping with my dead ex-boss.

The new guy I am dating is proving to be more challenging than moving back to Los Angeles from New York and working in Hollywood again. He’s the most independent/co-dependant guy I have ever met. He’s constantly in contact with me, and we talk all day long, but a lot of what we are talking about is how he doesn’t want a commitment. My shampoo is called “Long Term Commitment.” I don’t do casual very well. I feel like one of those guys to whom No doesn’t necessarily mean No. He is very funny and I feel comfortable around him, and the fact that he doesn’t work in Entertainment is his main selling point. I could listen to him talk about computer systems all day long, just as long as I don’t have to talk about scripts and whose movie opened better last weekend. Hollywood is aggravatingly myopic, and my new non-boyfriend is about as far removed from it as he can be. I did find out he has deep-seeded aspirations to be an actor, as he has an angelic singing voice and has done a lot of theater, but I’m hoping to crush his dreams of making a living in the Arts as soon as I can.

I’m finding it’s tricky to balance a non-relationship and my job, because so much of what I do is social, and most of my drinks are with men who want to sleep with me. In keeping with his contradictory dating philosophy, my new paramour has told me he doesn’t want to be exclusive, but that he would appreciate it if I didn’t sleep with anyone else. We’ve spent almost every night together for the past month, and he’s lucky because I don’t really have the attention span to date more than one person at a time. My Boss doesn’t like how social I am anyway, he would prefer I magically conjure up early looks at available scripts and books than cultivate any new relationships, so I’m taking a break from going out right now and focusing on a burgeoning non-relationship and our new television project which is based on my Internet column about my life.

Because I’ve been tasked with the job of developing our new television show, which means mostly notes on the draft of the Pilot Script, my Boss has thrown me the paltry title of Story Editor. I still have to answer his phones and do his scheduling, but I now have added responsibilities and the cache of a junior executive. I’m trying to throw a lot of the phone answering at the Interns, but more than once today I’ve had to disguise my voice when an agent called for me. It’s getting complicated trying to keep my job, but they haven’t paid me yet for my Internet column and I have about two hundred dollars to last me until payday. As a matter of fact when I write the novel about this time in my life, I’m thinking of calling it “Two Hundred Dollars ‘til Payday.”

My Boss has done me an extreme kindness by sending some samples of my Internet column to a novelist whose books he helped adapt into movies. Her name sounds similar to a better writer, and so I get really excited when she writes him an email to tell him what she thought of my work. She isn’t a huge fan of the column, she calls it “gossipy,” but she says she likes my proposal for the television show, and when I realize she’s not the Pulitzer Prize winning author I had originally thought she was, but a far inferior writer, I’m relieved I wasn’t just torn apart by someone of higher caliber. A columnist for a National Magazine has contacted me about my column as well, and she wants to do an article about me. She will have to use my name in the article, which will effectively cancel out my anonymity, but she says they will hire a professional do my hair and makeup for the picture, and I agree to the article because I don’t mind being outed as long as I look cute.

My Boss has also found an Agent at one of the biggest Agencies in Hollywood to represent me; the Agent is an older woman with a stern personality, but she is well-respected in Hollywood. I am grateful my Boss is helping me, but I’m also sure he knows an Agent he procured for me is not going to gouge him for money for the television series. I am convinced the Agent has not actually read my writing, but I’m not going to turn down a chance to be represented by her company.

It’s all very exciting, to have an article written about me, a Big Shot Agent, and a television show being developed with my name on it, but for some reason my day is still ruined when the Publicist my Boss is meeting with tells me she went to High School with the Guy I dated when I last lived in Hollywood, the one with the girlfriend. She is very pretty, and her face turns ghost-white when we realize we both know the same guy. She tells me he is the first person she ever slept with and he had told their whole High School about it after he promised he would keep it a secret. I’m just about to completely lose faith in my taste in men when I get a pretty bouquet of flowers delivered to me from the Computer Guy, congratulating me on all my recent successes. They should call this one the "Mixed Messages Bouquet."

After work I am meeting with the girl who is writing our television pilot, she wants to have drinks at a fancy hotel and she asks me a lot of questions about my childhood, because she wants to incorporate my transition from farm-life to Hollywood in the pilot episode of the show, and I think once I start talking she starts to realize how little I have in common with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, unless there is a version of this children's book I haven't read in which the main character has loose morals and a low self-esteem. She seems most interested in the Hollywood stories, though, and I am more than happy to supply her with the material. We sit and have drinks for a while, and then she says she has to get home to her boyfriend who has been texting her all night, and I wonder out loud if someone in a healthy relationship and a 30 Million Dollar deal with a network is able to really understand the plight of a Development Girl whose life has been a string of broken relationships and dwindling bank accounts. She reminds me that Stephen Crane, who wrote The Red Badge of Courage never actually went to War, and I am dubious of the analogy because I'm not sure if All out War isn't just the tiniest bit better than this neverending uphill battle.

Instead of going home, I spend the fourth night in a row at my new non-boyfriend's house because I am appreciative of the flowers and I'm hoping he changes his mind about having a girlfriend, or maybe we will spend so much time together the term will just slip out of his mouth someday when asked about me and I'll finally have a real boyfriend again, someone who can break my heart in a more official capacity. Tonight I cook the Computer Guy a gourmet dinner, and just like at work, where I am a Story Editor who still does the job of an Assistant, in my private life I am a Girlfriend without the title of Girlfriend. Someday I will get the recognition and compensation I deserve, but for now, I wash the dishes from my homemade meal while my non-boyfriend falls asleep on the couch and I'm suddenly feeling almost happy. I might be poor and unappreciated but there is nowhere to go from here except up.

January 28, 2010

2010-01-28T14:42:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1. Gently drop hints as to what famous, beautiful Actress should play me in the television series.
2. Quit my job and move to Alaska if they cast that heavy girl from Hairspray.
3. Never, ever agree to go away for the weekend with a guy I have known for two weeks again.

I can’t stop making out in public with my new non-boyfriend, because I am wildly attracted to him, especially his complete lack of interest in having any sort of relationship with me. I’m no psychiatrist but it’s possible I’m familiar with this feeling of neglect and coldness: my Mom used to call me Number Five because I was her fifth child and once she left me sitting in front of the library for eight hours because she forgot to pick me up. She also left me overnight at my friend Heather’s house, and at a gas station in Florida for half a day when we were on a family road trip. I guess I had it better than the sister who is one year older than me: when she was only two, she plopped right out of our car one day when we were turning a corner and sat there on the curb waiting for us to come back and get her for hours. It’s hard to keep track of eight children, and it’s equally as hard for the Computer Guy to balance all the girls he is apparently sleeping with – although I can’t imagine a nineteen year old GoGo dancer who still lives with her Mom is that hard to pin down.

At work my Boss decided to put my internet column onto our Development Slate as a potential television show. There has been no talk of money thus far, but I have it on good authority that people get paid for this sort of thing, so I’m hoping someone drops by a paper bag full of cash to my little apartment in Korea Town and all of my problems will be solved. I can’t imagine how nice it would be to get paid to write any more than I can imagine liking a guy who likes me back and who doesn’t call me dude and constantly send me texts meant for other girls.

Our office is abuzz with news of our new television project: my Boss has never dabbled in T.V., he had previously thought he was above it, but the Show-runner who is in love with my internet column has piqued my Boss’ interest in this inferior medium. What an unholy pairing these two: the edgy, independent-film mannered Director and the King of Nighttime Soap-Dramas. I am not allowed in meetings to do with this project, so I’m not entirely sure how this will all work out, but I do know everyone around here is being nicer to me and it’s exciting to have something fresh to work on aside from my Boss’ pet Science Fiction project. For some reason I think this is the perfect time to skip town for the weekend, as my new boy-friend had invited me to ski with him at Mammoth. I grew up skiing, in the Mountains of New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts, but I don’t remember much about the sport except that it was really cold and we got to drink hot cider.

Nowadays I snowboard, I learned a few years ago with my best friend from Childhood. While I was living in New York, we joined a ski house in Vermont to meet guys and I got bored sitting around our house all day, and I have always thought the clothes snowboarders wear are cute, so I decided to take snowboarding lessons. Even though I am commemorated in the Boston Globe by a guy I went to Middle School with as the most un-athletic person in our school, it turns out I am not so bad at this snowboarding thing. I don’t point my board down the hill or anything crazy like that, I go down the Mountain sideways, but at least I haven’t cracked my head open, which is more than I can say about other sports, like, say, driving a car.

So I am off to snowboard with my new crush, who is an avid skier and generally about the most handsome man I have ever met, and nothing is phasing me at the moment: he is most definitely going to fall madly in love with me when he sees my mad skills and I bust out my suspect dance moves at the sawdust-floor covered bar we hang out in tonight. It’s a long drive to the Mountain from Los Angeles, but somehow we never run out of things to talk about, well, I talk and he listens politely and he holds my hand the whole way there which is making me just about die with happiness. I’m nervous about taking a day off of work, but I feel like my most recent contribution to our Development Slate buys me peace of mind for the weekend. There’s a rabid intern with crazy eyes with his sights set on my job though, so I check in often to make sure I haven’t been hastily replaced by my needy Boss.

Once at Mammoth, we check into our hotel which I found online, and I wish I had looked at the picture on the website more closely as it’s a romantic Bed and Breakfast, and the commitment-petrified guy I am with has only known me for two weeks and is sleeping with at least three other girls. The proprietor makes it all the more uncomfortable when he greets us as a “lovely young couple” and shows us to our tiny room which is one of only four rooms in the entire “hotel”. This seems to be just more fodder for humor for us though, and we go out into town for a few drinks, and I try my hardest not to act like this whole situation has not just driven my desire to couple up with this guy forever into overdrive.

The next morning we get out to the Mountain early and there has been a dumping of more than a foot of new snow. I hadn’t realized how much this guy loves skiing, he is like a little kid on Christmas morning, and I can already see myself three years down the line screaming at him that he loves skiing more than me. I take one run down the mountain and he is more than gracious as he compliments my many falls, but when we get to the bottom of our first run, I can’t feel my legs at all. In a few minutes I have no feeling from my chin down to my feet.

It’s every guy’s dream, I am aware, to meet a cool girl in a bar only to see her Medivac’ed from a Mountain two weeks later, and the rest of our weekend is kind of a blur. I remember being carted away in an ambulance and seeing how truly upset he looked, and thinking this whole “I don’t want a girlfriend” thing is just a big act. Unfortunately the doctors in this small Mountain Town are not very familiar with Multiple Sclerosis, so it takes a few different grand exits in which I say I am feeling much better and then we wind up back in the same E.R. before they check me in to the hospital, and my weekend has turned into the kind of date that either bonds two people together for eternity or this guy is definitely never ever going to call me again.

It’s very hard to act laid back when you are stranded in a Mountain Town with a guy you barely know with some sort of strange full-body paralysis. I didn’t want to tell my weekend date at first that this must be a heretofore unseen part of my disease, so I blame it on the sausage we had for breakfast at our dinky hotel. Some smartass doctor, however, tells him there is no such thing as Sausage Paralysis, and the secret is out, I am officially neither graceful nor cool, but my date is heartbreakingly nice about the whole thing, and even as he is on his cell phone lying to the 19-year-old he is dating about where he is for the weekend, he is holding my hand and smiling at me as if this is something he has dealt with many times before.

The next day I am still frozen in time when my Date reminds me that the first night we met I asked him to take me to Red Lobster and let me order whatever I wanted off the menu, and for some reason this makes the feeling in my legs come back, and we are sent away from the hospital with a paper bag for breathing and a strict admonishment that I should see my Doctor when I get back to Los Angeles. It should be an awkward drive home but it’s not, and I am just as surprised as he is that this happened in the first place. I have never lost all feeling in my body like that, it’s scary and weird but not as frightening as liking a guy this much who has told me repeatedly he is not looking for anything serious.

I am back in the office on Monday as if nothing happened, and it seems while I was gone affection, or compassion, for me through the ranks has actually grown as everyone is working on the television pilot, which will be written by a writer from Sex in the City, and I think my Boss especially has a new appreciation of the open wound which is my life story that I have exhaled onto the internet like a big sigh. He talks to me sweetly when he sees me as if he is afraid I will skewer him in my column like I did my Boss the Comedy Director’s Producing Partner, and when he speaks about the project he talks about it as if it’s not a true story, which is fine with me because I don’t want him to know I am half the dirty slut I portray myself as when I write.

When I get home there is an email from my weekend Date, and he is asking how I am feeling as if we have known each other for years. He wants to know if tomorrow would be a good night to get that Red Lobster dinner, and I’m truly flabbergasted that he wants to see me again after the Worst Weekend Date Ever. There is no way watching me carted off the Mountain in a helicopter was hot to this guy, not a chance Sausage Paralysis is a turn-on, so maybe I had him all wrong, maybe he is just a nice guy packed inside the wrapper of a gorgeous multi-dater, could I possibly be this lucky I think as I try to compose the perfect funny and casual response to his email. I end up erasing my carefully crafted email, what’s the point of trying to pretend everything is casual after what we’ve been through, and I wrote back: “I would love to go to Red Lobster with you.” Nobody in my family even came to the hospital when I was first diagnosed with M.S. and this guy spent two days with me in the hospital over the weekend, the least I can do is be direct with him. Sometimes life is just too big for witty repartee.

January 23, 2010

2010-01-23T18:37:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1. Find the perfect dress to wear to a date/funeral.
2. Think of something nice to say to office slut who might be the unlikely key to my success.
3. Conquer crippling fears of romance, deaths, and success before the funeral on Sunday.

I’m the definition of a false advertisement, and I feel badly that the guy I met last night doesn’t know this. I come across cool, all loosey-goosey and full of trashy talk and innuendoes, and the quiet, serious computer technician I met at a cheesy Los Angeles bar last night thinks he hit the dating lottery. Little does he know I am not laid-back at all: I’m complicated, demanding, impossible to please, and if you date me long enough my keen sense of humor will be twisted back so that the only joke I’m really telling is the one on you. I bought him a drink and I kissed him before sending him off with the cute girl I talked up at the bar for him, and he texted this morning that he got lucky with the girl, and it was really great meeting me. It’s the classic bait and switch, he will likely never see that other girl again, but I give great text so I’m sure the next girl he gets lucky with will be me. Unfortunately for him, lucky isn’t really the word I would use to describe getting involved with me: this poor guy has no idea what he’s getting himself into. A good friend should tell him, if it seems to be good to be true, it probably is.

It’s all sales, the dating world, and I’m terrible at sales so I try and stay out of it, I don’t internet date or have my friends set me up, I just sleep with guys I know sometimes and every once in a while fall headlong into love and it’s like a bad car accident with casualties and broken parts scattered all over the road; it’s an unfortunate circumstance for everyone involved, and the computer guy from last night is just standing in the middle of a wet road staring into the headlights of a car without brakes. But that doesn’t stop me from sending him flirty texts all day, like mini-advertisements for a great new product on the market. I think I’m ready for a new bad relationship, it’s been a while since I really fucked up someone’s life.

The guy from last night is dangerously handsome, but he seems strangely unaware of this fact, as if his job working with computers somehow makes him a nerd, but he’s far from a nerd, he is sexy and a witty texter, and he’s like an unwrapped present I am hoping nobody besides the girl I set him up with the bar last night gets to open before I do. I want to spend all day angling my text messages to entice him to ask me to come over tonight, but our office is in a tailspin because my Boss’ producing partner, the one I was sleeping with, has died in a motorcycle accident. He was only 32 years old, and I’m definitely shaken up about it, not that I liked him at all, but I’m reminded suddenly as his tearful mother comes by the office to pick up some of his things, that development people have lives outside of our little world: they have families from towns in states without oceans and mountains, and broken-hearted exes who couldn’t leave their jobs to follow their boyfriends to Hollywood. I’m glad nobody in the office knows we were sleeping together because I’m thinking of asking my new text buddy to go to the funeral with me, there will likely be a lot of glamorous Industry people there and I don’t think he’s exposed to glitz like that in the computer world.

In light of our office tragedy, everyone has decided to go out for drinks so my new friend will have to wait to be chased for a while, and even my Boss decides to come with us for solidarity’s sake. He stands out in the crowded, swanky hotel bar as being the only guy in jeans and cowboy boots, and he’s trying too hard to fit in, and I’m just glad there are no lampshades around because at one point he surely would have put one on his head. My nemesis Lorna takes the somber gathering as an opportunity to actually speak to me, and I don’t have the heart to be cold to her today, so I listen to her praise my writing to my Boss, and I’m surprised by her seemingly whole-hearted endorsement. She tells my Boss we should option my internet column as a television show, and he asks me to give him a sampling to take home to read for the weekend. I’m a little nervous because my column is racy and he’s my Boss, but I assure him it’s all completely fictional, and he jokingly asks me if I would leave my job if our company bought my project. I don’t think I would, to be honest, because I’m so used to things falling through for me in this area, and I like my job well enough, it actually just got a little less complicated with the untimely, and likely Quaalude related, death of my office paramour.

When I get in my car to drive home after an exhausting day, I have a million new text messages from my new friend. It’s funny to me that he is carrying on with our parry and thrust text flirting completely unaware of the tragic circumstances on the other end of the phone. His last message simply has his address, and I sigh and turn my car around to go make yet another in a long line of dating mistakes. It’s not lost on me that the guy had sex with another girl last night, one he knew as little as he knows me, but I find it hard to judge people when I know I am just as screwed up as they are, plus I find him alarming in his bewildered handling of the whole thing, as if he is surprised two girls want to have sex with him at all. Does this guy own a mirror, I think as I pull into his driveway, there is no way we are the only two girls to ever find this man attractive.

The next day at work I send an email to the only remaining friend I have whose name is Sarah, and attach a picture of my computer friend. She’s one of my best friends, she flew to New York from L.A. the day I was diagnosed with M.S., and she agrees he is scary beautiful, and is genuinely concerned I’ll get hurt. I don’t know any other way to date without danger involved, so she’s not helpful in deterring me from my current course of action. The guy gave me many speeches last night about how he’s not looking for a relationship, so apparently even though he does not find himself as handsome as the rest of the world does, he is aware enough to not be desperate for a girlfriend, and that’s okay with me because I’m still holding a small flickering torch for the son of the famous folk singer, who calls me just enough to keep me interested, but who is still dating the stripper with the six year old daughter.

Lorna is excited about the prospect of bringing in a project to our company, and seems weirdly unaware of the fact that, since I wrote the thing, I will likely get more credit than her, and is flinging herself around the office authoritatively, telling me to add my column as a potential television show on our open assignment list, and reminding me to include some samples in my Boss’ weekend read. She's clearly angling to be the fastest-promoted D-Girl ever: from transcriber to Producing Partner in a month. I suppose she has a chance, since there is now a job opening in our company. The whole situation is surreal, and I want to tell her to go back to transcribing and leave the Development to the rest of us, but I’m reminding myself that I want to be a real writer and not just an assistant who writes a dumb internet column on the back of cocktail napkins while I’m out schmoozing other Development geeks. Apparently Lorna met a big show-runner’s life/business partner at her last job and has gotten him excited about my column too, so I guess I have to pretend to like her fat ass and big boobs for a little while. My new non-relationship has invited me to go skiing at Mammoth next weekend, and I think I’ll go even though I think it’s strange he wants to go away so soon, especially since he said he’s not looking for a relationship. It’s possible he’s banking on that threesome I promised him the first night we met, but I think I’ll take his abundance of contradictions as a good sign: at least it won’t be boring.

The funeral is this weekend, apparently Entertainment Weekly is covering it, and the computer non-geek is coming with me. He doesn’t know I have been sleeping with the dead guy, so I hope I don’t cry or throw my panties in the coffin, which would be a sure giveaway. I should feel badly I am bringing a date to this, but I keep remembering how the Producing Partner treated me like a dirty little secret and seemed really surprised one day when I wore a cute skirt and makeup to the office as if he never realized before that I was actually pretty.

As I’m sewing up the hole in my nicest black dress that I shoplifted back when I was poor and amoral, I’m suddenly nervous. What if my Boss loves my column and wants to buy it to make it a television show, the good-looking shy guy wants to be my boyfriend, and Lorna McSlutchen is no longer my enemy but my new best friend responsible for launching my Hollywood writing career? What will I do with all my bitterness and cynicism if my life suddenly starts turning into exactly what’s advertised, the happy tales of a semi-young, semi-attractive, semi-talented Ingenue who’s life is just beginning, not over as was previously thought? As I read my latest text message from my date to tomorrow's funeral, I realize I have nothing to worry about. He is asking if there will be any hot chicks at this shindig. I don't know what I was thinking, I can still be depressed and edgy, there is no way any of this is going to turn out well.

January 14, 2010

2010-01-14T19:26:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1. Write a novel or screenplay.
2. Sell aforementioned novel or screenplay.
3. Get novel or screenplay made into an actual movie.
4. Retreat into obscurity so as not to be harmed by the inevitable backlash to said movie.

There’s nothing worse than regret, and all I can do with all of mine is hope that Sarah has some too, and regrets dumping me as a friend almost five years ago. She has her own company now, she is no longer 22 and living on a boat, so I assume she’s doing well out here in Hollywood, but I hope she thinks sometimes about the illustrious writing career of mine that she helped to launch, and that had she been able to stomach being my friend, she might have professionally reaped the benefits of my success. I would have, at the very least, dedicated my book to her. Now she’ll be lucky if she gets included within the Acknowledgements, a hasty recognition buried between the names of shallow industry bigwigs who helped me along the way. I’m sure all the loosely-veiled references to her drug use and rampant sexual exploits throughout my book will be thank-you enough, but I can’t resist the temptation to include a sarcastic nod to her on the crisp, new first pages of my novel. I’m aware she’s the one who encouraged me to write in the first place, but I think I would have been happier in obscurity than written about in a nationwide magazine only to implode and have nothing come of my brief success.

It occurs to me I don’t want friends who ask me to go out every night, because I’m starting to like staying home more and more and I was genetically programmed not to be able to say no, but I would like to have the option of friends to hang out with should I ever become bored or lonely. Because I’ve burnt out all the lovely people of Hollywood, I’ve recently begun importing friends from across the ocean. I had dinner last night with a girl I met in the airport on the way to London. She’s an actress, a real one, not a waitress avoiding life, and Spanish and unfairly beautiful. We went to Magnolia and while we were at dinner we ran into Joe, a well-educated, black, gay agent who at one point in time wanted to represent me as a writer, but was scared of alienating my then-manager who was a short man and extremely wealthy and powerful. My manager was Sarah’s boss, and had produced a wildly successful teen franchise, a couple of them actually, and had gotten rich solely off the instincts of his development people, including Sarah. I’m quite sure he never even read the scripts for his big franchises, and although his web site was the original home for my column, I’m positive he never read my writing, and signed me as a client off of Sarah’s behest. I heard a rumor he now operates an illegal casino out of his garage, I’m not sure what he does but I do know he is no longer Sarah’s boss or my manager, not that any of that mattered while we were running Hollywood.

Running Hollywood might be a bit of hyperbole, I’ll admit. Sarah and I did not run the town, we started as assistants, actually, but I will say we wielded a great deal of behind-the-scenes power. One of the first scripts we had a hand in pushing through the system was written by an assistant who worked in the bungalow next to mine on the Fox Lot. I was not a huge fan of the concept, but it was a charming script, and I had a secret crush on the executive who gave it to me. I, in turn, gave it to my boss who was the Big Comedy Director’s producing partner, and he, of course, passed on it. He passed on everything. But I liked it enough to mention it to Sarah, who was still an assistant at the time to the short but powerful franchise-builder, and she signed the assistant as a client. Sarah’s company didn’t try and sell the script I gave her, as it was really flawed structurally, but they asked the girl to write a treatment for something Sarah’s boss could sell right away, and she wrote a fifteen page summary of a script called Catch of the Day about a guy and a girl who meet at a fish market, and Sarah’s boss attached one of the stars of his huge teen comedy and sold it immediately for $250,000. That movie never got made, the teen star dropped out soon after Sarah’s boss collected the commission on the sale, but the original script that I gave Sarah got made a few years later. Just by coincidence, my Big Boss at the Famous Actress’ company produced it, and an actress who just died of an overdose starred in it. It was a bad movie even though the original script had gone through serious overhauls over the years. There is only so much development people can do for a script, you can make the structure better, and try and rely on the cleverness of the writer’s dialogue, but a mediocre script with a bad director makes a bad movie.

Sarah had also given me my Gator script, the first project I ever brought in which was Animal Farm set on a Gator farm in Florida – the Alligators rise up and rebel against the rednecks who run the farm – and although that movie was never made I still think it would make a funny movie. I suppose it was problematic, what with all the violence and the necessary live-action animals, but it was hysterical. And it’s not easy to make me laugh out loud while reading a script. I laughed out loud at My Sister, My Lover which was a short script about a boy who takes his sister to the prom, but I’ll admit it was a sick premise. The funniest line in the script was when the boy’s friends ask him if he is really taking his sister to the prom and he says “Stop calling her that!” I guess if you are reading scripts all day it takes something really twisted to actually make you laugh. It’s amazing to me how many scripts I have read that were really good that didn’t get made. One of my favorite was a comedy about a Gay NFL Football player. There is a Regina King-type wife, and he comes home from practice to tell her he is gay and she says (waving her finger in the air) “You BETTER mean happy!”

Sarah’s company was pretty much a schlock-factory, but they made a gross amount of money off of their teen franchises so they could afford to take a chance on a script once in a while. One day a guy I went to high school with, but barely knew back then, came to a drinks gathering I had and we became good friends and he mentioned to me that he had written a script. His script was really remarkable; it was a dark, period piece about a tortured painter, kind of like the movie Shine, and I told Sarah about it as soon as I read it. She loved it as well, and called her boss at 10 o’clock at night to tell him she had found a great, undiscovered script. She brought it over to his house, and he came to my friend’s bartending job at 9 AM the next morning, a Saturday, to sign him as a client. I was surprised, because Sarah’s boss was not exactly known for his art-house projects, but he said he wanted to be legitimate, and this script could get him to the Oscars.

Unfortunately for my high school friend, the script was never shopped or sold, Sarah’s company gave him an overwhelming amount of notes and I think it’s hard for an intelligent guy to take notes from a bunch of unintelligent people. After a while they lost momentum on the project, which would have needed a tremendous amount of care and attention to get made in a town looking for the next blockbuster, not the next brooding movie set in the 1920’s. I will give Sarah credit for gumption, I think it’s of paramount importance out here to have the guts to push for projects you believe in, but even after she was promoted to manager, she was still treated like an assistant for a while at her company, and didn’t have the power yet to take meetings about my friend’s script, so she had to rely on her bosses, who didn’t have the same passion as she did, especially for something so potentially unprofitable.

Sarah and I had a hand in a bunch of other scripts getting bought over the next few years, because besides our own companies, we had the ears of all of our friends and their companies, and we had tracking websites through which we could create buzz about something we liked, and hundreds of drinks meetings at which we could talk up good material. I always tried to save my hype for projects I believed in, because I know most of my friends will only give me a few chances before they stop reading stuff I send them, and I think to this day I can still get a project on a lot of desks out here, only because I rarely ask for favors anymore, and there are still many people out here who have me to thank for their jobs or their writing careers. I am shamefully bad, however, at self-promotion, and therefore am likely doomed to be an assistant or mid-level executive forever instead of a sought-after writer. Sarah was good at promoting my writing, but the also-named Sarah told me when we were having our Last Fight Ever that Sarah talked worse about me behind my back than most people would talk about their dog, so in retrospect I would have preferred she didn’t talk about me at all. This was the third Sarah in three years who had stopped being my friend.

The Exodus of the Sarah's was complete a few years ago when I invited the also-named Sarah to the Hamptons with me. She had met a guy who was doing a summer play in Sag Harbor, the town my share house was in, and had always wanted to go to the Hamptons, but as far as I know the also-named Sarah has never had an actual job, so I had to buy her plane ticket from L.A. to New York so she could go with me. The weekend was a total disaster, she cheesed drinks off all of my housemates the first night we got there, and then disappeared to hang out with the actor, and I didn’t see her until the end of the weekend. I left the Hamptons without her, because I hadn’t heard from her to arrange her ride home, and when she got back to Los Angeles we had a terrible argument about the weekend in which she informed me Sarah and Streets and all of my ex-friends have less-than stellar things to say about me. That’s not so shocking a revelation, but the phrase “They talk about you worse than people talk about their dogs” has always stuck with me.

The also-named Sarah was not a great loss. Her claim to fame is that she was engaged to one of the creators of South Park, but he dumped her after she caught him cheating with another girl, and burned a hole with a cigarette into each item of the girl’s clothing. She was vapid and had large breasts, hence her nickname, which was Bounce – although she insisted the nickname was because she liked to bounce out of parties – and she was hot in an L.A. way, and she introduced Sarah to copious amounts of drugs the first year after I moved back to New York. I liked hanging out with the also-named Sarah because she surrounded herself with good-looking people, so I felt this must mean I was attractive, but something deep down told me maybe she hung out with me because I paid for her a lot, and our weekend in the Hamptons just drove this point home.

I think overall it made me nervous to spend a lot of time with the also-named Sarah because I wanted to make her happy so I did a lot of things with her I wouldn’t otherwise do, like drugs. I don’t do drugs anymore, and I wouldn’t say I was ever a big partier, other than the one summer I lived in the sweet guest house in Hancock Park, but by “partier” I mean that there were a lot of drugs around and that doesn’t mean I actually did them. I wasted a lot of good drugs that summer by buying them with the also-named Sarah and then letting her do them while I just laid on the bed and listened to her talk. Coke always made my stomach hurt, to be honest, the part that ever actually made it up my nose, but I know the also-named Sarah would not have been my friend for as long as she was unless I at least pretended to be enjoying that drug. I am sure, however, that the actual Sarah was not my friend just for a drug partner because when I met Sarah I had never done a drug in my life, except for the one time I tried mushrooms in college.

The problem with being a fake-cocaine user is that when you get tired of pretending to do the drug, all of the friends you made while you were faking it might not be your friend anymore. I’m still confounded over Sarah’s dumping of me, and a big part of me thinks maybe she dumped me because she was afraid I would tell people she did so many drugs. The funny thing is, if she hadn’t dumped me I wouldn’t have told a soul, even though it makes my writing more colorful. Now I feel compelled to write about her drug use, not because I’m bitter or angry, but because I can do so without fear of retribution. There is nothing worse she can do to me than abandoning me as a friend. Revenge is just a happy coincidence.

Now that I’m back in Hollywood, without Sarah as a friend and starting as an assistant again, I can’t say I have the same kind of pull I used to have, but with anonymity comes freedom. I no longer want to be the best development girl in town, I just want to be a writer, and I’m an assistant to a Big Wig Director to pay my bills because I don’t have too many other skills and I’m too smart and cute to be a bartender forever. I’d like to say I’m a blank slate, starting fresh, but of course that’s not possible so every once in a while I’ll run into someone from my old life and their eyes will widen as if they thought I’d fallen off the Earth rather than moved to New York for a few years to regroup. When big things do happen for me, and I’m writing the bio for my book jacket, I’m considering having it read, simply, as following: “The Author was nobody before publishing this novel.” because as far as I'm concerned, nothing in my life has really happened until people start reading about it and the Sarah's finally realize what they've left behind.

January 7, 2010

2010-01-07T14:13:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1. Drop “I brought a script in to my company” into every third conversation.
2. Really stop sleeping with semi-boss.
3. Possibly give up sex completely, until it’s time to have a kid. What good has it ever done me?
4. Have a kid before I’m too old to remember how to have sex.

I don’t see what’s so great about new – I prefer old. Old friends, old jobs, old boyfriends; I like things that are worn and comfortable, and places I have been a million times, so the better half of my two week vacation was my stop-over in New York City, my home since college where even the biting cold feels soothingly familiar. The first five days of my vacation I spent in London, which sounds fancier than it was. In actuality I slept through a Pinter play in the West End, dozed off on the London Eye, and felt on the whole that I was observing a great city from afar, it was probably too short a trip to fall in love with anything. I had the nagging feeling throughout my visit that I was a little inferior to the stylish lag-abouts who jaunted down Oxford Street as if on a cold and crowded runway. But then I flew to New York, where it was even colder but at least people have the decency to dress in bulky coats and hats until they get indoors. I can still taste the spicy sausage with rice cakes I ate at Momofoku, which falls under the category of new to me, but I went to other old haunts like Blue Ribbon Bakery and I realized I’ve been living in Los Angeles for a year and I still feel like a current New Yorker, enraged about higher taxi fares and annoyed by the onslaught of Borough hoppers on the New Year. And then it’s back to Los Angeles, where there aren’t any Dunkin’ Donuts and the food all tastes the same, and I have a new job and new job-friends but at least I don’t have to think of things to talk about, because all my old stories are new to them.

I tried not to make any resolutions this year, because they are silly and arbitrary and it just depresses me when I break them, but it was hard not to reflect on New Year’s past as I sat in my old rent-controlled NYC apartment that my ex-boyfriend still lives in – I remembered my first New Year’s with him, when we both worked at Houlihan’s in Times Square and I started crying half-way through service because I couldn’t handle the massive throng of revelers that descended upon my cocktail station right after the ball dropped. I was only 19 and had just started having sex, it would be accurate to say I was fragile and it was a far cry from the New Year’s of a few years later when I catered a party for Fifi at one of the Most Famous Young Actors in Hollywood’s house. He had bought the house just for the night, knowing it would be desecrated by his drugged out friends, and I palmed the ecstasy he gave me because I had never done drugs but wanted to seem game. At around 10 PM the young actor, who had just starred in the Highest Grossing Movie Ever, ran around the house while we were setting up the party with a Happy New Year’s crown on asking us if we thought anyone would show up. I can’t be sure but I think five thousand people came that night, there were bouncers up and down the steep driveway, and all of the candles we had floating in the pool overlooking Sunset Boulevard had burned out long before the girl I was working with and I decided to leave at 6 AM. Fifi charged the Actor about 9000 dollars for chips and salsa, and someone confiscated my camera, but it was a successful party as evidenced by the passed out group of hot young actors that littered the living room.

That was my first real brush with Mega Fame, and the Actor was surprisingly insecure and fragile. The girl who worked the party with me knew him from auditions before he got famous, and my roommate at the time, a strikingly gorgeous Bible-thumping Teri Hatcher look-alike, used to babysit for his ex-girlfriend, a model with watery blue eyes, so I think he felt comfortable around us. That and the four hits of ecstasy he had taken. He said he didn’t want the party to feel catered, which was lucky for Fifi who had not sent enough alcohol and food to satiate an eighth of the guests who ended up coming, and he seemed genuinely surprised when I told him that his ex-girlfriend had met my roommate because they both went to every day of the Menendez brothers’ trial years before. It’s funny how that will be a night I will never forget and I’m positive the Actor doesn’t even remember I was there.

That wasn’t my Best New Year’s Ever, that title is reserved for a small family dinner in Bayonne, New Jersey with my ex-boyfriend and his parents in the room above the local Mediterranean restaurant, but it seems relevant now as I'm back working in Hollywood after a brief rest, and my new Boss would die to make a movie with that not-so-young-anymore Actor. My new Boss called me incessantly over the Holidays, with middle-of-the-night epiphanies and mid-morning musings, and I didn’t mind at all because I like to feel needed, but I can tell he’s happy to have me back at the office where he can have my undivided attention and not have to do so much time-zone math. He has a meeting today with a young director he has decided to mentor and the guy is tripping over his own words as he gushes over my Boss’ movies. After the meeting, the young director stops at my desk to chat me up, and I am reminded of a saying I read a long time ago: “The minute you meet someone, you know why you will leave them.” If I end up with this guy by some remarkable trail of events likely spurned by my recent bout of paralyzing loneliness, I will leave him because of his too-trendy dark glasses and gluey spiked brown hair. He might be a prodigy but he looks like a douche.

The director does end up asking me out, and I almost say no because I don’t want to seem desperate, but he asks me to come play cards with his friend and his friend’s girlfriend tonight, and I can’t resist an all-night card game at someone’s house. The only thing better would be if we were playing Euchre, which is a game I learned from my Dad who was once the President of the National Euchre Society and it a game which is only popular in the Midwest. I am hesitant about going on a date at all because I have only so much available space in my brain for men, and my two ex-boyfriends take up most of that, plus I hate change, but I figure this poser-asshole is not going to get any of my heart, he is lucky he’s getting one night with me with those pretentious glasses he is wearing.

My boss is happy I brought a project in, even under such suspect conditions, so he’s taking it easy on me and I don’t have a lot of work to do. Everyone in the office is treating me differently, except Lorna McSlutchen who greets me with something south of frosty disdain when I see her for the first time after our Holiday break. I can understand her attitude, after all, I’ve been gone for two years, while she has been out here polishing her D-Girl crown and servicing puny agents, and I brought a project in while she’s a glorified typist.

I spend the remainder of my fourth day back from vacation reading my friend Wes’ column on the Harper’s Magazine website. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, a friend of my also-freakishly intelligent ex-boyfriend, and his column is witty and intellectual and he makes me feel like a shoemaker. However, when I worked at the Big Action Company, he sent me script after script and there was nothing he wrote that I could buy from him. I’ve found this to be the case in other instances as well: highly intellectual people who write scripts trying to adhere to what’s currently selling, as opposed to writing about something that were interested in, and their scripts are well crafted but ultimately empty, hollow attempts at being funny, or scary, or romantic.

Wes, however, once gave me great advice about my boyfriend at the time, the ex I had been with for 16 total years. I had moved back to New York from Hollywood, and had gotten back together with him after being broken up for almost three years. When I arrived in New York I realized he still had feelings for the girl he had been with when we were apart. I took a cab out to Brooklyn in tears and plopped myself on Wes’ doorstep. How could I be this stupid, I wailed, I am just second choice, he really wants to be with her. Wes was very patient. But he is with you, he said firmly. Imagine you are with someone for 70 years and when you’re lying next to each other on your deathbeds, you’re able to glimpse inside his head. What if you saw he was thinking about another woman? What does that matter, Wes continued, if he was with you the whole time?

I got what he was saying, but I still think I’d be pretty upset if I saw into my old husband’s brain and he was thinking about another woman. There would be some 'splaining to do. On Wes’ sage advice, I stayed with the guy for a mere five more years before we parted amicably – well, he was amicable. I was a hysterical, psychotic mess. It’s the same reason it’s difficult for me to get excited about the New Year, I have a hard time letting go.

As I’m leaving the office, my Boss’ producing partner wanders by my desk to say hello. I haven’t seen him in three weeks, as he was away working on a movie to which he is attached as a producer, but office gossip must have reached him about my date tonight. He is bleary-eyed and lecherous, but I only have myself to blame. I am reminded as he struggles with the words to ask me out that he is not at all attractive. He has just made some really high-grossing movies. I wonder where all these guys who suddenly want to take me out were at the New Year when I ended up having to kiss my female cousin. When he finally makes his offer, I sigh because he is not asking me out anywhere at all, the only time I have ever been in public with him is the group dinner at which we met. He just wants me to come over and work on a set of notes with him. Or so he says. I’ve read his script notes, they are barely legible, colloquial and he writes as if he is talking to a college buddy about his script – things like: “Make the lead guy black,” and, “Really? THAT’S your ending?” I think I’ll pass on his thinly veiled offer and go play cards with the fledgling director.

On my way to go home and shower, I get a call from a guy I met a few nights ago at a bar. He's the son of a legendary comic actor who passed away a while ago. Not an attractive man, he trades on his father’s fame for sex, and he says he has a script he wants to show me, I just have to drive over to the Palisades at 10 PM to pick it up. By some small coincidence, however, I have a friend who met this guy a long time ago, and he told her the same script story. She went over to his house, and says it was the closest she ever came to being raped. He even used the same title for his fictional script, Joy, which he says is about a Catholic school girl. This guy is a descendant of Hollywood royalty, and he clearly doesn’t know how small a town this really is. I politely decline, and make my way home, with just a few minutes to change and go meet my future ex-boyfriend for cards.

The card game is at the director’s friend’s apartment, and the couple we are playing with look as if they just stepped off the pages of an Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue. I regret immediately my understated clothing choice, and wish I had taken my Mom’s advice to embrace the joys of liquid eyeliner. I feel dowdy and mismatched with this small group of close friends, and it’s a good thing I’m bad at cards because I’m out of the game early and the director doesn’t even get a rushed, obligatory kiss at the door. As a matter of fact I can’t find him when I’m ready to leave; I think he is in the bathroom doing drugs, so I write him a note on the back of the hostess’ “Things to Do” list because it’s the only paper I can find.

As I’m trying to think of what I could possibly write to the director that would salve his bruised ego and not make things uncomfortable for me at work, I can’t help but read the model/hostess' “Things to Do” list. She is probably 28, tall and beautiful, and her boyfriend is prettier than she is. The list says things like “Send out Save the Date Card for Wedding!!!” and “Thank Uncle Marty for the 5000 dollars he sent us for Christmas!!!” All exclamation points and written with annoying curlicues, the list reminded me of how much simpler life was when I was in my twenties and prettier, but I feel a bit sad for her over-exuberance, as I think that when you are that optimistic life can only get worse, not better. I will say that for myself I had a mostly miserable childhood, I was moody and intense and too weird to be popular, and it has only been recently that I felt I could ditch out on a party I had been taken to by a cool, successful guy. I would rather be home wrapped in my new Christmas Yankee Snuggie, and that way I have less chance of being raped by the son of a Comedy Legend.

When I get home I decide to make a list myself, but this list is of Things Not To Do, like sleep with my boss’ partner anymore, and stop saying yes to dates with guys I don’t like, because I could always adopt. I only have one thing on my real, top-secret Things to Do List anyway, and that is write a script under a pseudonym, and start talking about it to development friends to create a buzz so that when I decide to get an agent and sell it, it’s already being tracked as the next Juno meets Casino. I could pull it off, it would be a real development coup, and nobody would suspect I’m the actual writer because everyone thinks I’m just a screwed up, well-dressed, oversexed assistant. That would be the one new thing I would appreciate in my life: success. And not just the mild success that comes with bringing in a project, or stealing a man from a friend, I mean blinding, life-changing success like a windfall of money or a sparkling engagement ring from someone smart and funny. That would be change I could embrace, a Happy New Year indeed, and it would certainly be a welcome change of pace.

December 17, 2009

2009-12-16T15:02:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1. Make sure I am getting the top tier Christmas gift from CAA, and not the crappy third tier robe they sent me last year.
2. Figure out how to end a drinks with a dorky agent without having to make out with him, but still getting his clients' material sent to my office the next day.
3. Send an email to the girl at the Hollywood Reporter who spies on my tracking website about my recent accomplishments so she can put my name in print and cement my return to Development Hell.

For the first time since moving back to Los Angeles from NYC, I feel like a real Development Girl again. With Lorna McSlutchen breathing down my neck, I suddenly feel tremendous pressure to be successful. This week I scheduled drinks with agents and writers, tracked spec scripts and read until my eyes bled. And with my freakish ability to whip through a script in twenty minutes or less, I feel I’m finally caught up on the time I missed when I was checking into Mental Hospitals and gallivanting around New York with the gorgeous but broken East Coast Sarah. My boss the quirky Director is not as impressed with my recent efforts though, and calls me into his office during one of his rare visits to our bungalow, and wants to have a talk.

He’s strumming a guitar as he talks to me, which is mildly aggravating. “You have two sides to your personality,” he says, “the outgoing life-of-the-party who knows everyone in town, and the serious intellectual who writes amazing notes.” He pauses for effect and I’m feeling less chastised than complimented. “I don’t like the party girl side,” he says bluntly, and our meeting is over. I’m not going to clear my calendar, my boss clearly doesn’t know how this town works; it’s not just my ability to recognize good material, its obtaining the material before anyone else, and that only comes from lots and lots of scheduled drinks.

Back in my office, my d-girl friend Cynthia has sent me over some book coverage via messenger. She works at Paramount, is a tiny, Asian wisp of a thing, and she’s having an affair with a married Book Agent from New York. Paramount has its own New York Book Office, which is a luxury I haven’t had at my disposal since the Big Action Company, hence her limitless access to old book coverage, and she was more than willing to help when I told her I was looking for new projects for my boss. I notice in the middle of the stack there’s some “consider” coverage for a book that’s about five years old. Just from the log line I can tell it would be something my boss would be interested in: there’s a dog involved in the plot and he loves dogs. My boss hates the Hollywood machine and spec system and has been telling me for weeks that book adaptations make the best movies, so I decide to find a copy of the book and read it. It can’t hurt my job to bring a project in after only a month of working here. I call Cynthia to thank her, and tell her about the book, and she’s surprised there was such good coverage in the midst of a stack of unsold projects. She says she’s going to get the book and read it as well, as she works for a big producer who’s looking for her next project to set up at Paramount.

It takes me a while to find the book, as it’s out of print, but I finally locate it at a Venice Beach library and I send an intern over to pick it up. In the meantime I call the New York agent to make sure the film rights are still available and he says they are. He says the writer never sold the rights because he was waiting for the right company to come along, and the agent seems excited about the prospect of working with my boss, who has made a few really excellent films. When the intern arrives with the dog-eared copy of the book, I put my Good Will Hunting speed-reading skills to use and read the book in an hour.

I love the book, and call Cynthia excited about the find. She’s in the middle of it, and loves it too, and mentions bringing it to her boss as well. I include the book with my boss’ stack of nighttime reading, with the glowing coverage attached to the cover. Cynthia has had a rough road in Hollywood, she worked in the mailroom at one of the Big Agencies, and got involved with the big book agent thinking it would help further her career. The agent is old, and has kids, and comes to her house in the middle of the night when he is in town from New York to have sex with her, the whole thing is a recipe for disaster. She has long, bone-straight dark hair, and a tiny figure, and being Asian and smart, she’s pretty much every man’s sexual fantasy. Her Paramount job is her second junior executive job, its tricky being as sexy as she is out here and trying to be taken seriously. I’m glad I don’t have that problem.

I’m having drinks with a book agent to further my new quest to find my boss a book to make into a movie. He is short, and balding, but he mentions within ten minutes of my arriving that he went to Harvard, and he lives in some fancy house on upper Doheny. He is divorced, and he tells me his ex-wife is a writer and wrote a sitcom about how she had left him for her room-service waiter when she was taking a break from him at a Beverly Hills Hotel. I should feel sorry for him, as it must be hard having your marital woes paraded on network television like that, but he is condescending and calls me “scrappy” during our drinks. He walks me back to my car, and tries to shove his tongue down my throat, and I’m prompted to ask him just what about these drinks made him think I wanted to make out with him. He is oblivious to my disinterest and says he would like to hang out again.

When I get home, I have an email from my boss. He loves the book and wants to make an offer on it tomorrow. He is sending it to one of the best writers in Hollywood to see if he will attach himself to adapt the book for the screen. My boss has already told the Huge A-List Writer about the book, and the writer is excited to read it. I call Cynthia to tell her the news about the A-List Writer, and she’s disappointed because that is one of her favorite writers as well, and her boss has already passed on it. But she seems excited for me, and I can’t wait to go to work in the morning and see the look on transcriber-Lorna’s face when she hears I have brought in my first project.

I have a breakfast in the morning with an agent, and somehow I oversleep. I make up a story about running my car over a curb and into a porta-potty, and send her flowers to apologize. I arrive at my boss’ house with his morning coffee, and he seems upset with me. Curiously enough, when he made the offer on the five year old book this morning, a producer on the Paramount lot matched his offer. He seems confused as to how there is suddenly activity on such an old book, and I confess my friend had slipped me the old coverage as a favor. His eyebrows arch with disapproval, but my boss calms down when the agent calls him back and says the book author has accepted our offer because he wants my boss to make the movie. Its official: I am the best assistant in Hollywood.

I’m just as surprised as my boss that there’s an offer on the book, and I call Cynthia on my way to the office to ask her to explain. Apparently when she had told her boss about the A-List Writer’s interest, her boss reconsidered her pass and they made an offer early this morning. I am a little upset that Cynthia didn’t give me a warning about her boss’ change of heart so I could have prepared my boss for the competition, but from her defeated tone of voice, it sounds like Cynthia is the one who feels betrayed in the situation. “You should have given me more time to convince my boss,” she says, “it was my coverage. You stole this project from me.” I’m not sure how this is the case, and I don’t have time to talk about it further because my office is breaking out the sparking cider to celebrate our new project.

Cynthia doesn’t return my calls or emails, and after a whirlwind day of receiving countless text and email congratulations and fielding well-wishers, I cancel my drinks and head home for the night. I know this feeling, the aching in the empty pit of my stomach as I realize I just lost another friend. The desperate wail of my abandonment-issues demon is deafening as I listen to her voicemail for the fiftieth time. I’m almost inconsolable until my friend the hot blonde reporter from the Hollywood Reporter calls and tells me she is printing a blurb tomorrow with my name in it about my newly acquired project. It’s hard to be depressed when I know my name in print will be the first thing on Lorna’s desk in the morning.

I decide to call my ex-boyfriend, the one with the girlfriend-turned-wife, and tell him the news because he is one of the few people who will appreciate what a steep climb this was for me. We talk well into the night, a dangerous transgression from my decision not to talk to him anymore, and its comfortable and comforting to know that not everyone who ever loved me now hates me. I lost a friend today but brought in my first project since deciding to re-enter the world of Development in Hollywood. What better way to celebrate than ending my day with a horribly bad decision? I fall asleep dreaming of the headline for tomorrow’s article: “Stolen Project Catapults D-Girl to Top,” and the accompanying picture is Cynthia, tears streaming down her face. It’s official, I work in Hollywood again, and I have the new ex-friend to prove it.

December 10, 2009

2009-12-10T19:53:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1. Spread rumors that Lorna McSlutchen and the Alien have a secret development-baby.
2. Consider becoming a lesbian just for my London trip, will make it more exciting.
3. Attach my new script to all Development Christmas emails. Nobody will steal the idea, it’s not original enough.

The worst thing about moving back to L.A. from N.Y.C is running into old nemeses at the Coffee Bean. I was anonymous in New York, and now today I’m standing three people behind Lorna McSlutchen, whose boobs are so big she's taking up more than her allotted room in this crowded coffee shop. At first she doesn’t recognize me, I’m disguised by my Sarah Palin black glasses and faux-snakeskin Uggs that take up half my little legs, but then she catches my eye and hollers out a phony “Hey there! I know YOU…” and I’m instantly transported back to the day she asked me to lunch on the studio lot just to tell me she was dating my two-night stand. Her hair is darker, but I would know those humungous boobs anywhere, and she wants to know where I’m working, and where I went for a few years, and it takes her 3.5 seconds to bring up the guy who looks like an Alien who she thinks she stole from me. They aren’t dating anymore, apparently they dated for two years but he dumped her after she made the trek to Alaska to meet his family. I never met his family, I barely met him, I slept with him twice and he met Lorna at a party we went to and I never heard from him again. Her voice is too loud for this early morning coffee run and its giving me a headache. I express fake concern over her breakup and drop the Famous Actress’ name in her lap where it lands with a thump – “So that’s what I’ve been doing… just kind of hanging with her…” It’s half true and I think it conveys to her that I have not, contrary to her belief, spent the last two years pining over her short Alien-looking boyfriend who I slept with twice. I have become far too cool for that.

“I know someone who used to work for her…” she says, and my heart drops thinking of the stories she will soon hear when she calls to find out about my stormy departure from the Actress’ company. Of course she knows someone who worked for the Famous Actress, she’s Lorna McSlutchen, Queen of the D-Girls, Lorna knows everyone. Her lips are shaped like a perfect heart, and I hate her. Turns out, however, that the guy she knows was the Famous Actress’ producing partner before I started working there. I didn’t even know him. He and his wife became good friends with the Actress, but he started using his office to cheat on his wife with a girl from a popular gossip website. The Famous Actress found out and came into the office personally to fire him. She hasn’t spoken to her own brother in years for cheating on his wife, the Famous Actress does not take kindly to cheaters.

I tell Lorna I’m in a hurry to bring coffee to my hip new director boss, who lives down the street and makes me bring him coffee at home before going to the office in the morning. I mumble something about getting drinks sometime, and we exchange numbers. It’s a compulsion I have to be extra nice to people I don’t like.

At the office, I’m booking my trip to London today, for the Holidays. I’m going to visit my little brother who works in finance there. He’s my half brother, although he feels more like a whole, and he clearly didn’t get the underachiever part of my DNA because he actually has a real job. Last time I was in Europe was when I went to France to visit the Famous Actress’ stalker. I met her because I had just started working there and the office assistant missed a call coming in. I picked it up by accident and this tiny, quivering French voice asked if this was the office of the Famous Actress. I said yes, and she said she had a made a film she wanted to show the actress, would I mind if she dropped it by. Everyone who has ever worked for anybody famous knows the answer to this question is an unequivocal “No.” Or a more polite, we don’t accept unsolicited submissions, but I was feeling generous of spirit and her voice sounded harmless so I gave her our address, and she was there in a half hour. The receptionist showed her in, and she was shaking, a really pretty young French girl of about 20, clutching her little film in her hands. She stared around my office in amazement. “Does she really come in here?” Actually the Famous Actress came into the office quite often, she lived just a few blocks away. But the minute I saw how badly this girl was trembling and the tears pouring out of her eyes, I knew I shouldn’t have given her the address to the office.

The girl had flown in from Paris for one day just to try and deliver her film to the Actress. It was a short film about the girl trying to get her movie to the Famous Actress, and it was well done and cute. But there are legal reasons as to why I wasn’t supposed to be accepting her film, and I was glad to hear she was catching the next flight back to go home so I could figure out how to try and show this handmade little film to my new boss and recent Academy Award winner. She had also written a sort of journal to give to the Actress, all about how the Actress' movies had changed her life. It was all so heart-wrenching, there was no way I could turn her away. It took me six months to get up the courage to tell the Famous Actress about the French Girl and her film, after the six months it took the Famous Actress to learn my name, and finally one day I had it queued up when the Actress arrived, and in the end, she said she thought it was charming.

Of course I didn’t tell the Famous Actress how I had gotten the film, that I had let a potential stalker into our office, and the French Girl would call periodically to say hello, she ended up being smart and funny, and I visited her in Paris a few years later. With the exodus of the Sarah’s I figured I was not in any position to turn down friends. It was a crude Hollywood wake-up call though when the French Girl ended up forming her own P.R. firm and interviewing the Famous Actress and asking her about me, and about her film, and the Actress pretended not to know who I am, and said she didn’t remember the movie. The circumstances surrounding my leaving the company were so scandalous I guess it was better just not to talk about me. Or, she really didn’t remember who I am. Even in the midst of scandal I’m not that memorable, it turns out.

I think the French Girl is starting to forgive me for letting her embarrass herself in front of the Famous Actress, so I tell her I’m coming over the pond, and I also tell my lesbian friend from college who now works for a Big Television Actress who lives in London. She is the only girl with whom I have had full on sex, not in a threesome, just us, although my ex- boyfriend was in the other room watching TV. I’m excited to see her, and I doubt there will be any London hanky panky between us because there’s nothing true lesbians hate more than straight girls who have realized they were just experimenting. She’s a true Asian beauty though, if I was going to become a lesbian, it would have been with her.

I finish booking my London ticket, and my boss comes into the office talking about filing, and expense reports and my head is already on vacation. I’m in a bad mood because I swear Lorna’s boobs grew in the past two years, and she had a weird air of superiority, I thought she would be impressed with my proximity to the cutting edge Director, but maybe my new job is not that cool after all. Casually my boss mentions that he's adding a new member to our staff, someone to transcribe the notes he dictates into a tape recorder. I’m thankful because this was one of my job responsibilities, and I’m a slow typist and he rambles. He then says I know the girl, Lorna McSlutchen, they interviewed this morning at the Coffee Bean next to his house.

Suddenly there’s not enough air in this room, and Lorna’s peculiar confident swagger makes more sense. I run into a lot of people nowadays who are searching for jobs, and this morning Lorna didn’t have that desperate way about her. My boss tells me he hadn’t made it official until a few minutes ago, so he apologizes for Lorna's cloud of secrecy this morning at the Coffee Bean, I guess they are buddies now and tell each other everything. I finally find a job out of the middle of Development Hell, and the Development Queen gets a job here too? It’s my own private little nightmare. I may just stay in London and become a lesbian. Girls are pretty and we could share clothes.

After leaving the office, I get a text message from my new co-worker and former nemesis. She’s sorry she didn’t tell me but it wasn’t official when she ran into me, and she hopes things won’t be awkward, and she is also hoping that there are no residual bad feelings over her stealing the Alien from me. Ugh. The next call I get is from Little Boy Blue of the famous song, he hasn’t left his girlfriend yet but he’s thinking of me, and he has changed his Facebook status from “in a relationship” to “its complicated”, so that’s a start. I just want to crawl under the covers and never come out tonight, but its my friend’s birthday, she lived across the hall from me last time I lived in LA and doesn’t work in Hollywood so it will be a welcome respite from the claustrophobic arena that has become my life again. I put on a fake smile and some lip gloss and head to downtown L.A., where nobody from Hollywood hangs out.

My phone is already clogged with text messages from sympathetic development people who heard about Lorna's new job, it showed up on tracking websites, and I gather from the tone of the messages that she doesn't have many fans in this town, not for someone who has tried so hard to be in the thick of things. I guess I got what I wanted, moving back here, a job in Hollywood, but I'd forgotten what comes with that. My past, in the form of a hyper-vigilant, well-endowed D-Girl, will be sitting in the office next to mine. The movie of my life just went from a sexy romp to a dry tale of irony and cosmic retribution. This is not the way I wanted to make my grand re-entrance into tracking website fodder, on the coat-tails of Lorna McSlutchen, but comebacks in this town can be messy, the important thing is I am back, and I can't wait to get on that plane to London.

December 3, 2009

2009-12-03T14:14:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1. Hold more grudges.
2. Be the dumper, not the dumped for a change.
3. Book my ticket to London for Christmas Break. Make it a one way ticket, nobody hates me in London yet.

I should’ve sold those pictures of the Famous Actress and her new boyfriend, she made me go to the photo shop and take them off the machine herself because the guy was married, and after a very public breakup, the tabloids were dying to see who she would date next. If I had sold them, I wouldn’t have to work and could just sit home all day contemplating life and pinning butterflies to cardboard. And since I ended up leaving her company under duress anyway, it wouldn’t have made a difference. But I didn’t sell them, so I sit in my little office on the Universal Lot, listening to the Studio Tour tram go by my window. At least this tour is in English, when I worked for the Comedy Director the tour that passed by my window was in Spanish so I had to listen to “Es la Cabesa de Mary Tyler Moore” every fifteen minutes because apparently my office was in Mary’s old dressing room.

This time I can hear the tour guide talking about Will Smith, whose company is next door, and it’s distractingly soothing. We’re actually busy right now because my boss is prepping a new movie to direct, and he has assigned me the illustrious task of researching the main character, a chef. I know a little bit about chefs because my best friend the East Coast Sarah used to date a very famous and very hot chef; she was a waitress in his restaurant in NYC and they had an illicit and seedy affair, which culminated in East Coast Sarah getting drunk one night, dressing up like a schoolgirl for him, and passing out on Third Avenue in crotchless panties, much to the dismay of her family who had to pick her up from the Emergency Room that way. I only met the guy once, he was alarmingly attractive but it's hard for a girl to get excited about a guy when he has to use a pseudonym to call your best friend.

East Coast Sarah eventually ended up working for a big Food Magazine, and the poor girl had to stare at a huge picture of her paramour holding a big fish on her wall the whole time she worked there. They dated for a few years, and he left his wife finally, but for some reason he still kept my friend a secret. Occasionally he would call her at work during the day and tell her to meet him at the St. Regis to have a threesome with a prostitute; he was a real stand-up guy that “Lou”. Today I try to pass these stories off as research, but my Boss is not buying it, he wants to make a true-to-life and gritty chef movie, not something that might air on Cinemax after midnight. So I guess I’ll really have to do some work today, but now I’m thinking about East Coast Sarah and wondering how she’s doing. She lives in L.A. now, and is a journalist of some kind, I Googled her and she used to write for L.A. Weekly. I’m pulling for her, even though she dumped me unceremoniously. I just can’t seem to hold a grudge.

East Coast Sarah was around long before West Coast Sarah, we met working at a restaurant in NYC, she was only 21, and I was a few years older. I remember thinking she has a great way of wearing her clothes. She was tall and chest-less in a way that makes your clothes hang off you gracefully. I heard a rumor she got a boob job after moving to L.A. but I’m hoping she didn’t fall into that cliché. We were inseparable in New York, much like Sarah and I were in L.A., I guess I have a penchant for co-dependency. East Coast Sarah was funny and beautiful, but she also had an evil side. One time my little sister and I went to go visit a guy I went to High School with at Harvard, I was planning on cheating on my boyfriend with him but I got too drunk, and East Coast Sarah also got drunk and laid in the hotel room closet with just her feet poking out like the Wicked Witch of the West, and let out a barrage of inane insults. As my sister and I lay in bed, we listened to her rampage with great fascination. I know why I stayed friends with her so long though, she always made me laugh.

Until one day after I moved to Los Angeles, and East Coast Sarah said she wanted to visit. She had met most of my friends out here on various trips, and had been sleeping with the goofy redhead from Project Greenlight, who was a good friend of Streets. I was waiting for her call to pick her up from the airport, didn’t hear from her that day and never heard from her again. Apparently she made it out here, and hung out with Streets and the redhead and stayed with a different friend. I got an email from her after the weekend saying she didn’t want to be my friend anymore. Her explanation was similar to West Coast Sarah’s, which happened just a few years later. I take up a lot of energy, that sort of thing. I don’t know what it is with all these Sarah’s dumping me, I need to find a friend with a different name.

My boss needs me to go to Sundance with him this year. I haven’t been for a few years, the last time I went I took my good friend Jeannie from NY, and she made out in a hot tub with one of my dorkier Development Boy friends. Jeannie was my boss when we worked for Seinfeld, we got all the New York exterior shots for the show, but we were a renegade crew because they were supposed to use union members, so we had to tell everyone we were shooting a student film. We had a lot of fun, Jeannie had a knack for only hiring gorgeous male crewmembers and since the show was saving so much money not having to hire teamsters, we got to eat in fabulous restaurants and ogle the hot AD’s. It was a great job except for the times we would ask someone to shoot outside their bakery, for example, and then the episode would be about Jerry finding a hair in his pastry. That upset the eighty year-old owners a little. We also shot The Single Guy, and that caused me a little discomfort too when I asked my good friend if we could use her house in Queens for the shoot, and she got all excited about her house being on TV and had a viewing party. The night the show aired, they showed her house, which was a row house, and the Single Guy walks in and says “What a Dump.” I felt awful.

Sarah and I went to Sundance for our first time a few years ago with Streets and some other Development friends. It was a crazy few days, I was one of the only people who actually went to see movies, everyone else just sat around doing drugs. That was the first time I ever hooked up with Streets. It happened in the middle of the night, it was very sudden and brief, and the only thing I remember about it was looking over and seeing Sarah hooking up with the cute Rap Star-turned Actor’s producing partner against the refrigerator. I was glad I wasn’t the only dirty whore that weekend. Streets went on to work for a huge comedy star, and stopped speaking to me after I outed his three balls in a magazine. I had a big crush on him for a while, probably because he introduced me to ecstasy, and also because he used to call me at midnight every night. He wasn’t even that cute, it was the regularity of his phone call that got me. I think because I moved so much as a child, I like things that don't change.

This time in Sundance should be different for me, though, because I’ll actually be working. My boss wants me to scope out new directors; he has the idea of maybe taking one under his wing. He’s too big for Sundance now, but wants to be a mentor, and I’m going to try not to select a director based on how good-looking he is, I went to grad school, I actually know a little about film. I also have stopped doing drugs, for the most part, and I’ve since learned to snowboard, I’m thinking this year I’ll be the sporty girl at Sundance who checks out a few films but spends her days on the slopes getting rosy cheeks and flirting with like-minded athletic film-buffs. If I run into West Coast Sarah, which is likely as she has her own production company now, I already have my speech memorized. When she dumped me three years ago, she said her therapist suggested she take a two year break from me. I’m going to remind her that break time is over.

I spend the day reading up on chefs, but it all feels kind of inauthentic, as most big chefs are as sleazy and egomaniacal as East Coast Sarah’s secret boyfriend “Lou”. When I was a bartender in New York, the girl I bartended with every night was dating a guy who worked for a chef who ended up being a great novelist, and has his own show on the travel channel. The two of them used to come to our bar almost every night, whacked out of their minds on coke and tell us stories about doing lines off the refrigerator and bending waitresses over the beer cooler. I’m pretty sure that the food industry is rampant with substance abuse and wonton sex and I think my boss is making a mistake if he doesn’t show that in his movie. Anyway it makes the movie more interesting. When my boss calls to ask me how the research is going, I tell him I’m having a hard time because my experience with chefs is a bit different from the online articles I’ve been reading. He asks me to tell him what I know, and I do, untangling some of my own involvement lest he reconsider his decision to send me to Sundance, Hollywood’s weekend party winter getaway.

It’s been a long day, but I have more reading to do so I go home and crawl into bed with a stack of scripts. I’m reading a good script set in a future that is run by women in which men are sold on car lots like used cars, and I fall asleep thinking about the Sarah’s and Sundance, and the Spanish Tram on my old studio lot. Studio tours should be more realistic, I think as I drift off, and tour guides should tell the real stories about things that happen in production offices on the Lots, like “Es la Cabesa where Mary Tyler Moore hooked up with Lou Grant…” Just like my boss' movie about chefs, I think all things in life should be more honest. It would make the rest of us not feel so badly about ourselves. I'm thinking of starting a tour of my own, go by all my ex-friends' houses and announce all the famous people they have slept with on a bullhorn. Every third bus will be in Spanish, and then all the Sarah's will have a real reason to hate me. Don't worry, Sarah, I'm just dreaming, your secrets are safe with me.

November 26, 2009

2009-11-26T23:47:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1. Strive for something North of Mediocrity for a change.
2. Write notes on script about my life, work on making the lead character more likeable.
3. Work on my own life, make myself more likeable.

When I was a Creative Executive for the Big Comedy Director, two writers scammed their way into my office. They said they were writers for The Simpsons, and since they were going to be on the Fox Lot anyway, would it be okay if they stopped in to introduce themselves? When they arrived they told me in fact they had never really written anything at all. They had a bunch of treatments, ideas for movies, but hadn’t gotten around to writing any of them out. They seemed like nice fellows, and they were funny, so I chatted with them for a while. As is often the case, the conversation turned to me, and I told them stories from my childhood: how I had grown up on a farm in Massachusetts with no heat in our house and seven brothers and sisters, and how I was sure Henry the Black Sheep was out to get me, as he had opened the front door to our big farmhouse one day and was making his way up the stairs to where I was cowering on the top bed of the bunk beds I shared with my little sister. They agreed with me that it would have been hard to imagine my inauspicious beginnings could have led to a job in Hollywood, by way of New York City, and when they left the meeting they promised to send me a finished script so I could try and help them become real writers.

A few weeks later, I got a script from the two guys in the mail. They had been faxing me treatments non-stop, and some of their ideas were hysterical – I liked Jack Astronaut the best, but I had been insisting they write a full script – there’s a big difference between good ideas and proper execution. When I opened the script and started reading, it all felt eerily familiar. It was a story about a screwed-up little farm girl who went to New York City to become a theater director and ended up in Hollywood pushing paper around for Big Wigs. They had written a screenplay about my life. I have to say, although it had its moments, it needed a lot of work. I didn’t have the heart to pass on my own story, so I called the guys and told them we can work on it together. I’m still working on their notes, it has been a long-term project, and I’m thinking maybe my new boss the quirky Director can attach himself and turn the story of my life into something deserving of a letterbox, or maybe subtitles to tell the viewer what the main character is really thinking – something arty like that.

Its Thanksgiving today, and 85 degrees, which for an East Coast girl is bizarre, and there’s no big parade out here for Development people, no movie characters made out of balloons, as a matter of fact most people in Hollywood have gone home for the Holidays and won’t be seen again until January. My boss is a workaholic though, and he left me a list of things to do on email at 3 AM last night, so I stop by the office to get some things done before going over to Fifi’s for an orphan’s Thanksgiving Dinner. Its weird being at the office all alone and I take some time to rifle through his movie memorabilia before locking the doors for the weekend. There’s a robe which was a promo item from his last movie just lying around, and I decide nobody will notice if I take it, my little brother might like it as a Christmas gift, it’s one of his favorite movies.

My stalker has called twice already today to wish me a Happy Holiday and I’m tempted to invite him to our orphan’s feast, but then think better of ruining the mystery. I haven’t heard from Little Boy Blue, but I told him not to call me until he broke up with his girlfriend, so I don’t expect a call. It’s going to be a romantically lonely Thanksgiving for me this year, which is okay, and anyway I’ve invited a cute but slightly boring boy for our feast today, Mike Honey, that’s his real name, and he’s a friend of Adam, my moral compass. He doesn’t work in Development, but he’s an assistant to a director of television commercials, and he used to work at an agency, so we have a little in common. He is not the most scintillating of conversationalists, but I’m trying to get away from those Center of Attention-type guys anyway.

Fifi is a caterer to the stars, so Thanksgiving at her house will be lavish, although half the stuff she makes for big celebrities is frozen from Trader Joe’s or made from a box mix. She’s a good natural cook, her family is from Nantucket and they have a restaurant there, but she cuts lots of corners and I expect nothing less for this Holiday. One of the biggest male stars in Hollywood is addicted to her lemon bars which are really Betty Crocker’s lemon bars, and when I arrive at her house I see the lemon bars already set out for the guests. I have contributed by making my famous Lasagna and a tray of Pecan Rolls, and I’m certain when Mike Honey arrives he’ll be bowled over by my domestic skills. People start trickling in, and I’m amazed how many people out here have nowhere to go today. After a few hours I realize Mike hasn’t shown up, and I call him. He is hanging out with his brother and doesn’t seem to be in a hurry, which annoys me. He finally comes over when we’ve all finished eating, and I’m just South of enthusiastic. He is boring, and now he’s late. I have an uncanny knack of choosing men with wholly apparent flaws and I’m convinced it’s because I’m a perennial underachiever in all areas of life.

My mom lives in Napa Valley now, she runs a bed and breakfast with her German third husband, and I’d decided not to go see her this year because she’s convinced I made the gnocchi for our family growing up, and whenever she invites me she insists I make gnocchi for everyone. I’ve never made gnocchi, I was the one who made the homemade bread every day after school, and churned the fresh butter, and I make a mean spanikopitika, but no gnocchi. It’s the myth of the gnocchi that keeps me away, that and her far-right-winged politics. My mom was a State Senator in New Hampshire, and we could not agree less on anything to do with politics. So I stay in LA with my real fake Hollywood friends who won’t read a newspaper unless there is a good idea for a movie in there.

After dinner I ditch Mike Honey who’s droning on about his mother the Hoarder, and go to meet my semi-boss Don and his friends Bill and Amanda. Amanda starred in Brad Pitt’s first movie and is Australian and stunningly beautiful but Bill is a pig and treats her like a dog. It’s stressful hanging around with them, and not helping my job any to keep hanging out with Don, so I go meet my friend Kirsten who is just sitting in her apartment alone drinking. She’s British so Thanksgiving isn’t her Holiday, and she’s sleeping with her Uncle so she is shunned from her American relatives’ gathering today, so I keep her company awhile until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. I’m glad I’m not sleeping with a blood relative, and that I’m not married to an abusive asshole like Bill, so I have stuff to be thankful for, I think as I drive my ailing old car home to Koreatown at the end of a long day.

Back at my apartment I put the finishing touches on my notes to my writer friends on the final draft of the script about my life. We’ve been working on it for a while now, and it’s almost ready. The main character is not me, really, anymore, and we’ve made her story much more interesting than mine, but there’s something missing in the script and I don’t know what it is. My old boss the Comedy Director used to tell me he only directs movies with heart, and movies that are about something, he doesn’t just make funny movies like the Farrelly Brothers, his movies have a theme. I realize as I’m reading the D-Girl script that as scintillating and tawdry as we’ve made this girl’s life, and although there are laugh-out-loud moments, we haven’t given it a theme. There are lots of mini-themes throughout our story; like the rise of the bottom-feeder, the triumph of the downtrodden, the loose moral code giving way to an Ubercode that encompasses all moral codes, good and bad, and measures them against one Giant Moral code by which no human could abide, and that’s our heroine’s moral bible which is, of course, a set-up for failure.

Perhaps The D-Girl Movie is an avant-garde film and we trash the ideas of codes, and the theme is more of an anti-theme: this film rebels against structure and theme much like Samuel Beckett, and D-Girl and Sarah can just sit around the whole movie waiting for the Big Spec to come in.

Or, most likely, the movie about the story of my life is just about a girl who goes to Hollywood to work in the movies and while working in one of the most soul-sapping industries that exists, and while making mistakes and alienating friends, she finds herself lovable and loved, and successful on more than just paper, on the movie screen, despite years of fearing love and avoiding real success. Perhaps the final scene in D-Girl the Movie should be D-Girl herself, and Sarah, watching the movie at the Premiere in Westwood, just the final scene of the movie and they can see themselves on screen, friends again and with a big movie finally gotten made. D-Girl: the Movie has brought together me and my best friend who had a fight a few years ago and I can’t even tell you why we fought, but I do know the premiere of my movie wouldn’t be the same without Sarah, who made me the writer I am today.

Fade Out.
(for now)

November 19, 2009

2009-11-19T13:59:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1. Take dead friends off my Facebook friends list, or petition for a new category within “friends”.
2. Stop sleeping with Semi-Boss who just ignores me at work and then calls me at all hours.
3. Get intern to dictate scripts into tape recorder to listen to while driving.

When I used to work at Houlihan’s in Times Square, every year during the Rockefeller Center Christmas Spectacular all the Little People from the show would frequent my bar. We had a bouncer named Bruno and at the end of the night he would shout up and down the bar, “Suck Em Up, Yamos,” and he would put the drunk little folks under his arms and carry them to their hotel next door with their feet poking out and their eyes blurry from the colossal amounts of alcohol they would consume. One of the little guys was in a few movies, and he’s the first famous person I ever met. Well, half a famous person I guess. It was exciting to be around people with stature, and so I moved to Hollywood to work in the movies.

My first job was as a part-time receptionist at a very posh management company and I worked with a girl who is the hostess for Dancing With the Stars now. She seemed okay with just answering phones, but I quickly wrangled myself a promotion. I was hired as second assistant to the President of the Company, and the first assistant was a high maintenance girl named Lenny with the most annoying voice. My boss’ clients were hugely famous – most of the Saturday Night Live Alumni, and a big Action Star -- and we spent most of our days buying them things like can openers. One day I came into work and there was a death threat on the voicemail. Lenny was sure it was meant for her, but my boss was pretty sure it was for the Action Star who was a bad actor, because he was our most famous client. I kept quiet because I was new, but there is a slight possibility the death threat was for me as I kept company with lots of seedy, nefarious types at that time in my life.

My best friend at the time was named Hennessy, that was her real name but she has since then changed it to something more normal, and, apropos to her name, she was a stripper. We went to college together in New York City, and she wasn’t a stripper when we met. She looked alarmingly like Marilyn Monroe, and fell into stripping fairly easily as her Dad was in the CIA and wasn’t around much as a child. Hennessy moved out here before I did, worked out near the airport, and was one of the only friends I had when I arrived fresh out of the mental hospital and barely a hundred pounds. Right before I got my job at the posh management company, Hennessy answered an ad in LA Weekly that said “500 Dollars a Day – No Sex.” She worked for a woman named Ozo who was obsessed with Howard Stern and they gave hand jobs all day long. Hennessy only lasted there a few weeks, and I used to go visit her at the Bel Air house that Ozo rented out.

I wasn’t the type for the sex trade, honestly, I’m Italian and I have a big nose and I’ve never been comfortable with the largess of my boobs, but I was poor and jobless and Ozo convinced me that with a small makeover I might be able to make some sex-less cash. She took me to Hollywood Boulevard to shop for trashy clothes, and when we were pulling up to the house to embark upon my new career, we were surrounded by police officers, busting the place. Apparently they too had seen the ad for 500 dollars a day -- no sex, and they took Ozo to jail where she stayed for two days until Lester her houseboy pawned one of her fur coats to get her out on bail.

Ozo fled to New York where she was convinced the authorities were easier on Madams, and ran a high-priced call girl ring for a year before she was busted there too. I stayed in LA and worked for a different soul-sapping industry. I didn’t get my current job through a classified in LA Weekly, but the ad for a Hollywood Assistant job could be quite similar. No sex required, but it will surely test your morality and exists similarly in the dark crevasses of the professional world. Hennessy ended up doing private bachelor parties for money and soft-core porn, which pays surprisingly little. We stayed good friends for years, until I took her to Vegas with a bunch of development people and she didn’t exactly live up to her billing as my sexy stripper friend. Years of a diminished self-esteem had made her prudish and impossibly attention-starved. I left her in front of the Hard Rock and haven’t spoken to her since.

I guess I should be happy the police didn’t come a few hours later that day, and it was soon after that I started buying can openers for celebrities. It’s a different kind of whoring, but more socially acceptable. I worked for the President of the Company for six months and then got fired for missing a phone call. By then I had met and fallen madly in love with the Guy with the Girlfriend though, and he worked in Development, and I just thought that his career sounded fascinating. Reading scripts, tracking, socializing, making movies… it was much better than fielding death threats for bad actors. I got a job as assistant to the Big Action Producer because I wrote my thank-you note in calligraphy and closed the letter with a wax seal, and I was on my way. Turns out we didn’t actually make any movies at the Big Action Company, but there were lots of movie posters on the walls.

My first gold star at the Big Action Company came courtesy of Sarah, who was my new Hollywood Best Friend. Her boss was going out with a spec and she gave it to me early. It was a live action black comedy set on an alligator farm in Florida, in the vein of Animal Farm. I thought it was hilarious, and tailored my coverage to spark the attention of our boss the Big Huge Academy Award Winning Producer – mentioned throwing wet white tee shirts on the female characters etc. -- and he ignored all of the V.P.’s at our company who had literally thrown the script in the trash and bought the script for the bare minimum Guild allowance. I had been at the company six months and this was quite an accomplishment for an assistant. At this point I was trying to take my career seriously and excise all the soft-core porn stars and midgets from my life, but there was still an Asian guy who had paid my bills for a while who sent me flowers all the time; it was hard to leave my past behind.

I worked at the Big Action Company for a year, and it was like Development Boot Camp, we had a 30 million dollar deal with our studio, so we saw every piece of material released in Hollywood. I made friends at that company who will be my friends for life, it’s hard not to bond when you are in the trenches like we were, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that of the 7 or so assistants that worked there, four of us were stricken with tragedy. Two of us got M.S. and two other assistants died, one suddenly of spinal meningitis, -- that was Lee the Asian kid who used to always bring brilliant ideas into our creative meetings only to get ignored and then we would inevitably hear about the ideas getting made by other companies in the ensuing weeks -- and of course there was my good friend Jane who died in a car accident. It was a cursed company, to be sure, and I’m lucky I escaped with only a debilitating disease. I went back to visit years later and the other girl with M.S. hadn’t fared as well as I, she was barely mobile and they had her working only a few hours a day.

After the Big Action Company I got my job as Creative Executive at the Big Comedy Director’s company, and there was nothing really that Creative about my job, and nobody really under me but my assistant so I am not sure where the executive part of the title came in either. It was mostly just filtering material to my boss and the studio, but it was still a great job, and I’ll never forget sending my first project to the Comedy Director and having him call me and say, “I wrote some of the funniest movies ever made. They were funny. This isn’t funny.” It was hard to make an icon like that laugh, but I did sometimes, and that made his anemic Producing Partner easier to tolerate. Then one day my legs started falling asleep walking across the Fox Lot from my car to my office, and the running back to New York and my ex-boyfriend who I had dated for 8 years before I moved out here. An inexplicable medical issue will scare the Hollywood out of even the sturdiest of D-Girls. The job with the Famous Actress followed, and five more years with the Big Ex before we finally gave up, and now I’m back in LA, much to the chagrin of Sarah my ex-best friend I’m sure.

So that’s the backstory, most of it won’t be used in the movie, but it’s good to know where your character came from. This week my new boss has me picking out flatware for him at Crate and Barrel so you might say I’ve come full circle. He hasn’t realized yet that where I am lacking in administrative skills, I make up for in sheer will and determination, the Guy with the Girlfriend used to call me Rocky Marciano because you can pound me into the ground and I’ll just get back up again, dazed and bruised but still fighting.

I remember once in New York a ticket scalper sold me and my East Coast Sarah fake tickets to the Smashing Pumpkins. When we were escorted out of the concert, I saw the scalper right in front of Madison Square Garden. My East Coast Sarah and my gorgeous cousin stood under an umbrella in the pouring rain while I literally jumped on top of the guy. I ended up with only his sweatshirt in my hand as he easily escaped my less-than-menacing grasp, but the experience reminds me of my possibly futile quest to salvage something of my once-illustrious career out here. I realize that characters in movies need to grow and learn, but this is a True Story and maybe like the midgets at Houlihan’s I’ll never grow, and I’ll certainly never learn to let things go, so I fight un-winnable fights against things bigger than myself like unwieldy relationships and co-dependant friendships and when they end, I get up again and pick out a lovely set of glasses for my new boss, hair slightly askew but soul miraculously intact. Suck Em Up Yamos, that's just the backstory, this story is just beginning...

2009-11-12T13:29:00.000-08:00

November 11, 2009

Things to Do:

1. Buy a GPS so I stop getting lost..
2. Download all 70’s folk songs to brush up on new semi-boyfriend’s past.
3. Look into joining a Religion – possibly a trendy Hollywood one.

This is the first time I’ve been out of my pajamas before noon in two years. I’ve been at my new job for a week now, and I haven’t alienated any of my new co-workers, which is a small accomplishment. Because I have to drive my new boss around, however, I’ve gotten lost about a hundred and fifty times. I’ll never get used to the sprawling nature of the streets of Los Angeles and I miss the smelly, crowded subways of NYC chauffeuring me around, although after 9/11 the Famous Actress didn’t make us take the subway, mostly due to the Famous Actor/Conspiracy Theorist who had a production deal with us. He brought in personalized gas masks after the Big Day and assured us that the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan were rigged to blow up. I was lost a long time before 9/11 though. I was born without an internal compass and no innate sense of direction, and come to think of it, I lack direction in my life, and I’m missing a moral compass. I feel like I deserve a Handicapped sign for my windshield for these maladies, and maybe if I had one of those I wouldn’t have gotten three parking tickets in a week. So far this job has cost me more money than I’ve made.

I find comfort in the way I’ve worked my way down the proverbial corporate ladder in Hollywood, this way nobody expects anything from me, I went from temp to assistant to executive to assistant and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m starting to pad my social calendar again, now that I have something to talk about, so I had dinner with my friend Ellie last night who is a real D-Girl on the up and up, serious and bookishly pretty and I wonder how a girl this lovely can be so shy, until she tells me she followed a boy to a party in the seventh grade and had a Grand Mal seizure. She may be the only epileptic D-Girl I know. I met her in New York when she was job hunting, and when I got diagnosed with M.S. she sent me a plant. Not flowers: a whole living, breathing plant. Friends for life.

My new boss hates the term d-girl so I’m going to have to think of a way to keep my development girl ways on the down low, he really just wants an assistant, not a future V.P. and I’m trying to remember that as the emails and texts start trickling in as people hear about my new job. He has a small staff around him, a cushy deal with Universal, and everyone is very friendly because it’s my first week. It’s a miracle I have not made any major mistakes, except sleeping with my Boss’ producing partner the day I got hired, but that’s only a mistake if anyone finds out. Don has been perfectly cordial; to be honest I’m not even sure he remembers sleeping with me. Forgettable sex, that’s me. On my desk at work I have a Word-A-Day calendar, and its all development terms – “Spec” is today’s word, and underneath it says “Available Script.” – and my boss has already told me he’s annoyed by it. I’ve worked for anti-development people before, my Big Comedy Director Boss’ producing partner hated Hollywood, but I’m pretty sure he’s barely in the business anymore. Everyone hates it until they can’t get a job out here and may have to go back to waiting tables for a living.

The girl I replaced at this job knew she was leaving here for months, and there are stacks and stacks of papers to file – I think she stopped doing her job about three months ago based on the dates on some of these papers. I hate filing and cheekily tell my boss I think he is obsessed with notebooks as every other paper has “make a notebook” written on it. Is he really going to be making a movie about airplanes, I think as I make a shoddy looking airplane notebook and I haven’t counted the minutes before my work day was over in years. I’m bored so I check my ex-boyfriend’s voicemail, and it’s the usual flirty messages from random girls, I wish Jane the d-girl who died in a car accident hadn’t taught me the addictive lure of voicemail checking, there is way too much information here and we have been broken up for years, it’s possible I should move on.

It’s surprisingly easy to tell my boss I have a dentist appointment on my seventh day of having a real job in over two years, and I rush over to Fifi’s house because she’s hysterical. She’s been dumped by a 60 Minutes anchor with whom she was having an illicit affair, mostly in elevators. I’m not sure elevator sex even counts as a relationship and I tell her this but it doesn’t seem to help. So I throw some cute clothes on her and drag her to the Roosevelt where my friend whose brother is famous is having a drinks gathering. The Roosevelt is yesterday’s news but there’s still a small group of passé actors who frequent it, and I recognize one of the actors from Sarah’s first big movie, a huge teen comedy that put her first boss on the map out here. He’s the cutest actor from the movie, and I remember Sarah telling me that they had hooked up once on her boat, but he stopped short of having sex with her. They were just filming the movie then, and he wasn’t famous yet, and he told her he doesn’t have sex, something about being a good boy, and tonight he is regaling our crowd with stories about girls he didn’t like and how he always told them he was too good of a boy to have sex with them. I don’t say anything, and I don’t wish bad things upon Sarah even though she broke my friendship heart, but it would be slightly satisfying for her to know this.

Fifi is inconsolable so we sit by the pool drinking way too much, and I see a tall guy with blonde curly hair has been looking at me, so I look back, I’m single and buzzed, and he does a lot of staring before he finally comes over. He is so brooding it’s incredibly hot, and we end up kissing before he tells me he has a girlfriend. Sigh, that’s the story of my life. When Fifi and I are waiting for my car from the valet, I see the guy pulling away in his car – a Beverly Hills taxi. This finally puts a smile on Fifi’s face, and the whole way home she makes fun of me for making out with a cab driver. The only experience I have with cab drivers is my old roommate in Venice Beach, the assistant to the Big Action Producer, who my ex-boyfriend called the smelly cab driver because she had a peculiar odor. I don’t mind the cab driver thing so much, Fifi’s kind of a snob, but the girlfriend part disturbs me because I went down that road already, and that was my ex and he married his girlfriend instead of leaving her for me, they have two kids now and it took me years to get over. I’m not sure I’m even over him yet.

I deposit Fifi in her bed and drive home tired from my first full week of work. Early mornings and latte runs are okay though, at least I have a job and it’s for an edgy cool director who most likely is on Sarah's list of people to meet in Hollywood. My phone rings on the way home, and it’s the cab driver, his name is James and his voice is velvety and soft and I’m happy he called. He tells me his dad was a really legendary song writer who died tragically, was also a cab driver, and James is the subject of one of his most famous songs. The girlfriend is a stripper who has a six year old daughter, and although they are in a loveless relationship, he’s attached to the kid, so he stays. There’s literally electricity coming through the cell phone, I believe about half of what he’s saying but his voice is so deep and thoughtful I don’t really care. I tell him about my past with the guy with the girlfriend and he says he will stay away until his situation is resolved. I don’t really want him to stay away but I’m a grown-up now and I can’t handle more heartbreak so I hang up with a heavy heart not knowing when I'll ever talk to him again.

Before I make it to Koreatown I get a text from Don, he’s at a hotel in Beverly Hills and he wants me to come there. He says he can call me a cab if I don’t feel like driving, and I laugh to myself at the possibility that Little Boy Blue of the famous song could get the call and end up escorting me to an after-midnight booty call. I decide my drug addict new semi-boss is better than a guy with a girlfriend, and I drive to the hotel where Don is high as a kite, eyeballs bugging out of his head. I can’t stay long, I tell him, I have to work in the morning, and he laughs and says he will vouch for me with my boss. Is it so much to ask to meet a normal guy, someone who picks me up for dates and bores me with his talk of corporate life? After Don falls asleep I start reading some of the scripts he has piled up next to him, and now it seems this is not a wasted night as I find a script in the middle of the pile marked “confidential” with his name blasted across every page. The secret script is excellent, and not going out as a spec for a few days, so I take it with me when I sneak out of the hotel room with barely an hour before I have to be back at work.

I wonder what it would be like to have a job that does not require socializing, one of those nerdy jobs maybe the epileptic D-Girl would excel at, something smart and Nobel Prize-worthy like molecular biology. I get lost on my way home and have to turn my car around and go to work without a shower. Dirty, lost and tired, I think of calling my new cab driver friend for directions but somehow I don't think that would help me find my way.

November 4, 2009

2009-11-05T14:19:00.000-08:00

Things to Do:

1. Send a postcard to the nurse from the mental hospital as she requested telling her I'm doing okay.
2. Compose mass email to be sent out as soon as I land the job with the Big Director – keep it humble, but make sure Sarah is on the email list.
3. Get a boyfriend before New Year’s Eve.

It’s not that I miss New York for its qualities, it’s more because I’m most comfortable when I’m suffering and it’s too sunny in Los Angeles. I think I would like it here a lot better if I had a job, so I’ve spent the last few days jumping through hoops for the Big Director in hopes that he’ll hire me. First, he asks for two scripts. Thinking he means some undiscovered, unsold masterpieces that he can set up and direct, I dig up two scripts written by friends of mine, a dark period drama and a big comedy. His email reads: “I hate these scripts, but I want to hire you. What should I do?” Realizing he doesn’t want me to discover his next project, he just wants to know we like the same things, I quickly send him two scripts that have already sold for half a million dollars each. Seems too easy, but Hollywood is all about trust, and I suppose trust is garnered in this case by stating the obvious. Next, I have an agent call as a reference, and he emails me again. “I hate these people. Why are you friends with them?” I can’t denounce my friends fast enough, I need this job.

The Big Director has a Producing Partner, Don, and by some small coincidence my brother was his roommate years ago, and he’s friends with my friend Fifi who looks like television’s Maude. I’ve never met Don, but when I call him to introduce myself and set a general meeting, he tells me he is going to Fifi’s dinner tonight. When I arrive, I’m seated next to him, and he’s cute, I guess, in a hazy, he’s-on-Quaaludes kind of way, or maybe it’s the fact that he works with a Director I have idolized for years, I can never tell out here why I am attracted to some people. We all have dinner and it’s pleasant enough, and somehow I end up in Don’s car as everyone carpools to Fifi’s for drinks. Don needs to stop and get his bathing suit, and, well, I am either about to give the best job interview of my life or the worst.

Don is very complimentary of my tiny frame and makes me swoon when he says he can’t find an ounce of fat on my body. I guess I can throw away those cans of Ensure in my car and stop trying to gain back the weight I lost in the mental hospital. Apparently Don has always liked skinny girls with light eyes and dark hair, and I think he gets a good look mostly at the top of my head as we stop by his house for his bathing suit and we end up staying for a bit…

We arrive at Fifi’s appropriately sheepish, well I am sheepish, Don seems about to pass out from Quaaludes. Fifi is outraged. You are trying to get a job, says angrily, why would you sleep with him, that’s just a bad idea… My life is a series of bad ideas, so I ignore her protests and get into the car with my new boyfriend Don at the end of the night to go home. Fifi has always been a little controlling, I have an unproven theory that she's secretly in love with me, and I'm certain her protests stem from that. As we are crossing Wilshire to get to my apartment, he falls asleep while driving and the car ends up on a curb. I guess it was the Quaaludes. Something tells me I have not found true love with this guy. I’m supposed to meet with him in the morning about the assistant job to the Big Director, and as I’m getting out of the car he mumbles almost incoherently, um, you probably don’t need to come in for that meeting. Calling him my new boyfriend may have been a bit premature, I think as I climb out of his Escalade, and I wonder if I impressed him so much with my free-wheeling nature that he wants to hire me, or if he thinks I’m a dirty whore and the job is gone.

When I get home, I have an email from the Big Director. I’m hired! It’s slightly aggravating that he tells me by email, but he’s eccentric and I’m desperate, and anyway it would have been awkward to get that call while in bed with his producing partner. His email is flattering, he tells me my graduate degree really impressed him, and he was crazy for the set of notes I did on the script he sent me. The salary is ten thousand dollars less than he was originally advertising, but that’s my fault for putting myself on sale. He also mentions that it's not necessary for me to come in and meet with Don, who had called him earlier in the evening to tell him we met at a party and he thinks I’m perfectly charming. Phew.

I resist the urge to write the Big Director back and reference his earlier email about my choice in friends, as I'm now aware that his producing partner is not only a total dog but probably a drug addict. I think it's best not to let him in on the events of this evening. Eventually, I'm sure, he will find out about my exploits, my brief jaunts in mental hospitals, my penchant for drama, and my horrible driving, but I am going to treat this like one of my few relationships - hope once he gets to know me he gets hooked on my crooked soul and forgives me my faults.

It’s 2 AM and I start work in the morning, but I can’t sleep I’m so excited. I send out an email to my family and friends about my new job, and cc Sarah, who apparently skipped our mutual friends’ husband’s book signing the other night because she was afraid to run into me. My new boss is a Big Deal, and even though it’s just assistant level, it’s all about access out here in Hollywood. And starting at 9 AM tomorrow morning, Sarah either better cross the Big Director’s name off her Director lists for all her projects, or think of a way for us to coexist in this tiny little industry.

My stalker calls a little after 3 AM, and I decide to answer and chat with him for a while because I’m nervous about rejoining society and this seems like a perfectly unhealthy way to end my day. I met him a few years ago at a party I threw for my friend Nelly’s birthday, he was a junior agent at the time, and he has been calling me late-night ever since. I never answer his calls, and he rarely leaves a message. I’ve only seen him in person one other time, in the Hamptons, and he has actually blown up quite a bit as an agent in the interim, one of his clients is one of the biggest show runners in TV. I tell him about my new job, and he breathes into the phone encouragingly. It occurs to me I’ve never heard him speak a full sentence, until now. As I’m hanging up the phone he says, “Your whole life is about to change.”

He’s right, I’m officially Back and everything is about to change -- I have a real Hollywood job, a weird new boss and a complicated romantic office entanglement. Yes, I took a few years off to refresh my spirit, but somehow as I watch the sun coming up and the Hollywood sign glowing off in the distance from my apartment window after watching my new boss' old movies for the rest of the night, it all feels familiar, and it's just as if I never left this town.

October 31, 2009

2009-10-28T20:10:00.000-07:00

Things to Do:

1. Write amazing blockbuster script.
2. Pawn diamond necklace Cami gave me to pay rent.
3. Ask friends for producer credit on all their scripts – no more free notes!
4. Reduce name-dropping by one half.

Many things have changed since I last lived in Los Angeles. Not the least of which is, I have Multiple Sclerosis now, and although I still can’t pronounce it correctly, it doesn’t slow me down as much as it should. I’m mildly regretting telling the whole town of Hollywood soon after I was diagnosed, three weeks after 9/11, when I still worked for the Famous Actress in New York City. Now that I’m job hunting, it has come up in some of my interviews and I’m quite certain nobody wants to hire the little MS girl. Hollywood is just like high school, full of gossip and cliques, and I’m still the weird girl who used to wear bows in her hair and sit alone at lunch. If only my potential employers could talk to Sarah, she would tell them I am too self-destructive to let an unpronounceable disease affect my life.

I hate Halloween because I always feel like a drag queen when I wear a costume, but my niece is visiting from Ohio and wants to go to some Hollywood parties, and I feel like if people see me out and looking dumb they won’t be so threatened by me and might help me get a job. I dress as a seductive cat, of course, and my niece is a pregnant prom queen and we look like sexy idiots. We have three parties to go to, counting the one on the Universal lot for which we don’t have a ticket, but we made a pact not to let the lack of an invite to deter us from going to any party. We decide to try Universal first, and when we arrive, we notice ripped off wristbands littering the ground near the entrance to the party. After a trip to Rite-Aid for some tape, we slide right by security with patched-up used armbands, and notice immediately the costumes at this party are elaborate and expensive. We don’t fit in at all in our homemade, unoriginal costumes, but I’ve never fit in out here, and I spend the next hour pinned against a wall by a twenty-two year old assistant, and while he is ramming his tongue down my throat, I notice Selma Hayek and I have similar body types and Gwen Stefani’s pink hair is a color that doesn’t exist in nature.

I am finally convinced by my niece not to waste my night on an assistant, and we drive over the hill to go to the next party. It’s on Sunset in a warehouse, and when we get there the parking lot is mobbed with people about thirty deep. I see Claire Danes in the crowd of people waiting to get in, and a Fire Marshall in the doorway telling everyone the party is at capacity. There are a few people I know in the massive throng of rejected revelers, and as we try to figure out where to go next, I hear my name being called by the Fire Marshall. Looking around me at the sea of famous people, I’m at a loss as to why the man would know my name. He asks me who I’m with, and I point out all the friends I’ve run into, and we all get in. My niece has apparently given him a hundred bucks, and I applaud her ingenuity.

Inside the party, I don’t even have a chance to lecture my niece on the nefarious nature of Hollywood men when she is approached by a hot young actor. “What’s your fucking name?” he asks her, and I try to give him a dirty look but he isn’t looking at me, he’s looking at my breathtakingly beautiful niece who looks like Natalie Portman only prettier and without the attitude. He takes out his cell phone. “What’s your fucking number?” he continues, and I can’t wait for my niece to shoot him down just for the grease in his hair. She gives him her number though, and he makes my skin crawl with his parting line: “Are you going to come over later and let Daddy do dirty things to you?” I can’t believe he has slept with half of Hollywood’s hottest girls with those cheesy lines and that grease-filled hair.

Thankfully, my niece says she has no intention of going to his house later, and when he calls her phone at 4 AM, I answer. “Did you just call me?” he says, very subtle, and I snort into the phone, “No, she doesn’t have your number, dumbass.” We are up watching Autopsy on HBO in our pajamas, and this is the best part of the night for me, I don’t need to go to Hollywood parties anymore, I’m not cool enough and this town moves too fast for me now. And I realized at the third party tonight that my gorgeous niece is too aloof to care. It’s been a huge cross to bear my whole life that the females in my family are all better-looking than me. I have four sisters who are all blonde; I am a brunette and the proverbial dark sheep of the family. But I guess it suits me, my ex-boyfriend calls me a “sneak-attack” because he says guys don’t see me coming, I seem like the cool girl at the bar who can talk Yankees and Giants but in reality I am an ex-mental patient with big boobs and expensive shoes. I look over at my niece who has fallen asleep and I’m glad she has a story to text her high-school friends about; the hot young actor with a thing for pregnant prom queens and his trashy mouth will soon be the talk of her Ohio class.

Right after the hot actor pretends to not call my niece, my cell rings again. 4:30 in the morning on Halloween night. I recognize the number, and hit ignore. It’s my stalker, saying hi by not leaving a message, and it’s somehow comforting that he still cares. It’s amazing to me the adoration I can inspire in complete strangers, and the apathy I garner from the men I have loved. I realize trying to start over out here is a challenge, I get that I am not the girl who moved out here years ago having only slept with five guys and not a health problem to speak of except for a strange tingling in my legs every once in a while. But I’m good at my job, I write a mean set of notes, and I let everyone in this town wind me up and watch me whirl around like a toy monkey for years, I think I deserve a second chance.

When the hot actor calls back a second time for my now sound-asleep niece, I talk to him for a while, I can’t sleep and he’s drug-chatty. I tell him that his ex-girlfriend, a model, was friends with my old roommate and they met while attending the Menendez brothers’ trial. This seems to put him at ease talking to a stranger, and he plays me a song on his guitar over the phone. I promise him I’ll put in a good word with my niece and hang up thinking maybe I judged his oil slick of a hairdo too quickly. Everyone out here, even good-looking actors-turned-rock-stars, is looking for something, or they all would have stayed home and remained the best-looking people in their hometowns.

Before I go to bed I check my email one last time to see if I got the job with the reclusive Director, and he has sent me an email directly, to my great surprise, and on Halloween night. It only has one line: “Why should I hire you?” I want to write back, because I grew up poor and didn’t watch television so I have an active imagination, because when I was little my Dad used to bring a paper bag full of books every weekend that I would finish by the time he came to visit the following week, because I actually love movies unlike most morons I have met out here, because I am quirky and irreverent, like the Director’s own movies, and because he hates Hollywood and most Hollywood people hate me, so we have that in common, Hollywood hatred of some kind. But I don’t write any of that, instead I write back my own one line email: “You should hire me because I’m cheaper than anyone else.” That’s me, a bargain Development Girl, fresh from the fire-sale that was my former life. So I’m a little damaged, I’ve been on the back shelf for a while, but I’m on sale for a short time only, and I hope the Director appreciates my candor and can recognize a good deal when he sees one. This is my second chance, to rise from the ranks of sneak-attacks and black sheep, and you really can't put a price on that.

October 22, 2009

2009-10-21T19:59:00.000-07:00

Things to Do:

1. Stop making lists of ex-friends. Too depressing.
2. Find a job, possibly in Development again (brush up on notes skills and sucking up).
3. Finish draft of 80’s movie sequel so I don’t have to get a real job.

There’s not enough great sushi and Mexican food in the world to make Los Angeles better than New York. But this is where my career is, and my ex-boyfriend isn’t. I’m stuck here. I had three interviews last week, but I wonder if I have a chance at any high-profile assistant job once people start checking my references. My new best friend at the placement agency didn’t seem to mind that I have a checkered past, she found it endearing, but she isn’t the one doing the hiring. I was resistant to another development job at first, not wanting to ingratiate myself to those that despise me, but desperation has me considering it. On Monday, I got an email from a man who was our studio executive when I was at the Big Action Company. “Come see me”. So I went in yesterday. They need a junior executive, it’s a mini studio, right near my old bungalow. We talked about the job, and then he said he was going to bring in the woman who was to be my new boss. The minute I see her, my stomach hurts. She’s the ex-girlfriend of my old Boss who sexually harassed me, pregnant now, and married to another guy, but I can see from the terror in her eyes that she recognizes me, and there is no way I am getting this job.

She has big blue eyes which are now watery and she looks like she’s going to faint. The studio executive is confused. I had told him the story in the interview, because my old Boss was one of his good friends, but he was convinced she would have gotten over it by now. I can understand her horror. It could be decades, centuries, and I will never get over the woman my ex-boyfriend fell in love with days after my first departure from New York. Her face is ingrained in my brain forever. And this is much worse. Back in the day, this woman’s boyfriend of four years was in love with me, our company had to send me a letter apologizing for his behavior, they sent him to therapy, and he had to write me a letter as well. She was scorned, humiliated, and didn’t believe me when I said nothing had happened between me and her boyfriend. It wasn’t until years later that something happened, to be honest, and I barely remember it due to copious amounts of drugs consumed that night, so in my mind, it never happened.

As I drive off the studio lot with the two scripts the executive had given me for notes in the passenger seat, I can’t believe how unlucky I am. I know it’s hard to believe, but there are some companies in this town with which I have no unsavory connection. This however, was not one of them, and I’m resolved to do a half-ass job on the notes as I know I’m not getting this job.

My friend Kirsten wants to go out for drinks, and I kind of need one after this experience. We meet at the Sunset Marquis, which is quiet on a Wednesday. I have bad memories of this place because the guy I dated when I lived in L.A. last had a running tab here, and I think this is where I first realized he was never going to leave his girlfriend for me.

There’s a pretty blonde sitting by herself in the corner, Playmate-cute with big fake boobs and a glazed-over look in her eye. She’s upset, and I’m friendly so I ask her what’s wrong. “My A-List Actor boyfriend just broke up with me" she says… Kirsten is unimpressed. She works in Hollywood, as Vice President for the Idea Man’s company – they buy two line movie ideas from people for about 5000 dollars and attach huge talent to them. Kirsten has met everyone. I am a little more curious. Who is this A-List Actor? The girl’s pretty enough to be telling the truth, and she’s crying a little. His manager is against her, doesn’t want her walking next to the A-List Actor on the red carpet, etc. etc. I’m bored with this story unless she starts spilling names. Kirsten brings her into the bathroom and plies her with cocaine and when they come out, she’s ready to talk.

I’ll show you a picture of us, she says, and pulls out her digital camera. It’s the picture they sent out as a Christmas card last year, and the A-List Actor is sitting on her lap. They are wearing matching outfits, dressed like two elves. Only he looks a lot more like an elf than she does. It’s Vern Troyer, Mini-Me, and Kirsten and I are pissed we have just sat for 45 minutes listening to some girl cry over a man just under 3 feet tall. She tells us she is being discriminated against because she is a Tall person, that Vern’s manager is a Little Person too, and when she goes to his house, which is apparently the guest house behind his little manager’s house, she feels put upon because she has to reach down to turn on lights and use the bathroom.

I try to console her. I’m not just a girl you met in a bar telling you that you are too good for this schmuck. You ARE too good for this schmuck, you’re tall, and pretty, and this is Los Angeles, there has to be a normal sized A-List actor out there for you to date… There is something bizarre about this chick, she tells us her high school prom date was a parapalegic and he had made her a Pointillist painting with his pinky that took him seven years to make. She talks about the Playboy Mansion and how Hugh makes her sit behind the playmate table at a smaller table, and it occurs to me this girl has issues with self-worth. When Kirsten compliments her boob job, the girl asks us if we think it’s weird she got it done on 9/11, but the plastic surgeon was impossible to make appointments with, she says earnestly, so who could blame her. Weird is not the word that springs to mind. This girl needs some serious psychological care, and not the kind I had, where they stick you in a looney bin a few times, but real care for years and years. Kirsten and I are not going to be able to help her tonight, so I give her my sweater because she seems cold and we exchange numbers.

On my way home, I call my old Boss, the one who sexually harassed me. He wasn’t my direct boss, but I was an assistant and he was a Vice-President, and he used to hide behind the book case in my office and tell me how much he loved me. I don’t know how I remained friends with him all these years, he made my life at that company more than complicated, but I guess I felt culpable because I really did lead him on. I wanted to move up in Development, and he taught me things: how to do a great set of notes, how to track scripts, and he brought me and Sarah to the Famous Actress’ producing partner’s house where her dog ate my sandals during a heated game of quarters. I ask him if he thinks his ex-girlfriend would hire me, and he laughs. Not in a million years he says, confirming my fears, and my heart is heavy with regret as I wish I had sued my old company so I would have money in the bank and not have to look for a job out here in a sea of people who hold grudges.

Before I even get home, the semi-playmate calls to thank me for the sweater and talks some more about her short ex-boyfriend, and I’m wondering why it is that people always tell me their darkest secrets, I have the biggest mouth in Hollywood. I’m thinking I need new friends, but this girl might be too whacko even for me. When I’ve walked up the three flights of stairs to my little apartment, I’m happy to be home but dreading the onslaught of emails as word of my attempting (albeit unawares) to get a job at my old nemesis’ company will likely have spread like wildfire by now. There were always two camps, those who believed me that I was not sleeping with my old Boss, and those who didn’t. I am sure the latter camp will devour this new piece of gossip and further impede my attempts to get a job out here. I feel like giving up, becoming a bartender again, maybe in Austin, I hear that’s a good town. But just as I am settling in to face my detractors, I get a message from the job placement girl. She has the perfect job for me, working for an A-List Director, no social skills required, and he is eccentric, likes the fact that I come with spotty references.

I fall asleep dreaming of my cool new job, and all my anti-fans having to go through me to get to my new boss. Maybe I’ll hang out with the crazy chick this weekend, she was a good luck charm with her 9/11 boob job and penchant for cripples. I wonder if Sarah will want to be my friend again when I’m the gatekeeper to someone so powerful, if she will regret dumping me and if she even misses me at all. I hope when she calls me to become friends again that I have the strength to say no, to tell her I don’t need her, I have Verne Troyer’s ex-girlfriend and the job placement girl to go out with, and anyway, I’m not that pathetic anymore, my prom date walked on two feet and I only date regular-sized guys. I have a smile on my face for the first time in a while… I hope I get this job.

October 15, 2009

2009-10-15T12:56:00.000-07:00

Things to Do:

1. Find out if the rights to the Hitchcock remake are available, as I have just pitched the idea to 22 companies.
2. Write something new, or stop telling people I am a writer.
3. Go out with big agent who won't stop texting me.

There is a certain symmetry to my life that’s perversely comforting. As I bounce from coast to coast, job to job, and friend to friend, it seems I’m getting better at the hard landings. I expect chaos and instability. It’s part of being charming. I find it soothing that my apartment got robbed three weeks after moving back here, it means the Universe has not forgotten about me. A lack of drama would put me constantly on edge. My better friends teeter on the edge of sanity along with me, and one of them is coming to visit from New York to try and sell her screenplay. She has never been to L.A., as evidenced by her polite pearl necklace and eager grin. As I pull up to the airport curb, my heart sinks at the sight of her screenplay clutched in her hand along with her Gucci handbag. Her heels are too perfect, she will never make it out here.

Cami and I met at our Hamptons share house. I joined the house with my friend Rebecca, who was a d-girl with me in Los Angeles, but moved to New York about the same time I did. I was running to a guy in NY, she was running from one in L.A. Rebecca was funny, and pretty, but she hated black people, and the producer guy she was running from had cheated on his girlfriend with her, and was now cheating on both of them. Her double cheater was a charmer, I knew him in Hollywood, he was friends with my old boss who sexually harassed me. Besides the overt racism, Rebecca and I had a lot in common – she won me over one night in a bar when a guy asked her what her name was and she said “Beard.” After his blank stare she said, perfectly timed, “That’s B-J-I-O-R-D – the j is silent.” Friends for life, or at least a summer, and what better place for two ex-Hollywood girls to escape complicated sexual entanglements than Sag Harbor, NY?

Our Hamptons house was a mob of gorgeous New Yorkers, and one day out at the pool I saw a stunning brunette reading “Screenwriting for Dummies.” We called her tan girl before I got to know her because her skin got incredibly tan in the sun – not tan enough for my racist friend to treat her differently, but close. I introduced myself and humbly threw her book into the pool. She wasn’t going to need it now that we were friends. The Hamptons house was a summer of expensive social climbing that made Hollywood look like pre-school, and Rebecca and I ended our summer by accidentally sleeping with the same guy in one night two hours apart. In her defense, she had him first, he was talking to her all night. But in my defense, I thought she didn’t like him, and I had no idea when I slipped into his bed that she had been there a few hours earlier… In his defense… well there is probably no defense for sleeping with two best friends in the same night.

In any case, I had made a new friend. Cami was refreshingly naïve and wanted to be a screenwriter. She was from Westchester, and her parents were still together, she wore sweater sets and had perfect teeth, and I had never met anyone like her in my life. She had already written a novel that wasn’t half bad, and she gave me her first screenplay like it was her first-born child. I read it expecting to hate it like I had hated almost everything I discovered in the Hamptons that summer, but it was wholesome and earnest, like Cami, and she was a decent writer. I decided to help her because Rebecca stopped speaking to me after I spilled her dark secret to the guy we had inadvertently shared that night -- in my defense, the secret was relevant to our bed-hopping, and, let’s just say I have never been so happy I used a condom -- so I figured I could use the friend.

It’s been a while since our Hamptons Share, and when I pick Cami up at LAX, I notice she still has her tan. I had set meetings for us all over town, it was a good excuse, I figured, to see people I hadn’t seen in a while – big, powerful people who could potentially get me a job out here. I was dubious about the commercial viability of her script, which is something I didn’t have the heart to share this morning as her eyes seemed glazed over with glee. But the little Westchester girl with the perpetual tan could write, so I knew it wouldn’t be a complete waste of people’s time. It’s amazing how few screenwriters out here can actually write.

We have five days to meet with everyone I have ever known in Hollywood, so our schedule is jam packed. My older brother lives out here, he owns a talent agency, dates super-models, and drives a Mazerati, let’s just say we travel in slightly different circles. He is first on our list of engagements, and we have a drinks planned with him for this evening. As we are driving home from the airport, my brother texts me. “Change of plans. Meet me and Kato at Skybar.” Skybar? Who goes to Skybar anymore? And Kato? As in Kaelin? I had no idea they were even friends. I am delighted that Cami’s first night in LA will be at some cheesy bar with my brother and his semi-famous friend.

Skybar is hilarious, my brother kisses an 18 year old the whole time who was right off the plane from Wyoming, and Kato is a marvel of a one-man show, naturally funny and charming, a perfect first night for Cami in LA. “Did you know I am a question in Trivial Pursuit,” he asks, and “I am also an answer in Jeopardy…” It’s brilliant. We meet up with my friend afterwards whose brother is famous and he and Cami hit it off instantly. She’s only been in LA 8 hours and she’s already met two people closely connected with fame. Of course we haven’t started trying to shop her script, but it’s all part of the experience.

The next day kicks off a four day whirlwind of meetings, people I haven’t seen in a while, and everyone is gracious and accommodating. I try not to monopolize the meetings with my own stories, as this trip is about Cami, but it’s difficult. Navigating the two aspects of this business, the part devoted to finding new material and the social part, has always been tricky for me. Cami, on the other hand, is the perfect guest in everyone’s offices, polite and dressed impeccably, and her little script is neatly copied and smartly formatted. In every meeting I prattle on about her prowess as a novice writer, and we pitch an idea we would ostensibly write together, a remake of a Hitchcock classic. We haven’t looked into the rights of this remake, I actually just thought of the idea on the first morning of Cami’s trip as we headed over the hill to Warner Brothers, but nobody really cared.

I was worried our next few nights could never match up to our first perfect evening at Skybar, but I should never have been concerned. I had scheduled a drinks with an agent friend of mine who reps big novelists, and he greets us enthusiastically on Cami’s second night in LA. We end up back at his apartment where he promptly uses Cami’s precious script as a coaster for his beer, and when he produces the first drugs Cami had ever seen in her life I thought she was going to faint. She declines and gingerly moves her script out from under the beer and I am proud of her for not succumbing to the pressure. Of course had she been a bit more adventurous she might actually get her script read, but I am not going to crush her dreams by telling her that. This guy had gotten too big while I was gone, he wasn’t going to help her.

We escape the agent’s apartment unmolested, although my cell phone was ringing off the hook when we pulled away at 4 AM, he wanted me to drop her off and come back, and I take a page from her book and politely but firmly decline. I have grown up in the past few years I think to myself proudly as I turn off my cell and we drive back to my apartment, exhausted from a long day.

The next few days are a whirlwind of breakfasts, meetings, lunches, drinks and dinner. By day two I am already bored of trying to impress everyone, but on our way to the airport the last day we have lunch with my straight friend Erica who told us she was dating a girl, so that brightened things up. Overall, I think Cami had a good trip, she met 22 industry professionals who would all read her script and pass on it, hopefully in a timely fashion, and I was back on everyone’s radar as someone with a cute, well-dressed writer friend. All in all, her trip was a success for both of us.

Two days later I get a package from Cami in the mail. Her dad is a jeweler and had made me a beautiful diamond necklace with my Initial on it. There is a note thanking me for taking her around to meet everyone, and I think she wasn’t mad anymore about her submerged copy of Screenwriting for Dummies. She is back in New York, writing thank-you notes and I feel a slight sense of relief because it’s scary being in the spotlight again, and I plan to hide out for a few days before following up with everyone. I’m jealous she gets to go back to New York and I have to stay out here and keep up the façade, but I have a gorgeous new necklace to replace the jewelry the robbers stole from my apartment a few weeks ago, and a solidified friendship to replace the friend I lost in the Hamptons last year. Symmetry. It's comforting.

October 8, 2009

2009-10-08T14:38:00.000-07:00

Things to Do:

1. Simultaneously revive writing and Development career, or, at least get a job in Hollywood.

2. Must stop trying to add ex-friends on Facebook.

3. Read the fourteen scripts I have on email from remaining friends, and give cogent and proactive comments.

Okay, I will admit I have a few regrets. It’s possible, possible I say, not definite, I burned a few bridges out here. It’s possible I got out a gasoline can, planted dynamite, and burned those freaking bridges to the ground. It’s amazing to me the selective memories of Hollywood people! Nobody out here can remember who won last year’s Academy Awards, but they all remember little D-Girl and her lost jobs and broken friendships. Suddenly New York City seems warm and friendly and I miss the fact that nobody there cares about me at all. Seeing the look on Sarah’s face when I ran into her at Boulevard even made me miss watching the Twin Towers crash to the ground from my window as I sat in the Famous Actress’ production office that morning. I regret outing Streets’ small penis in a magazine that went out free with every issue of Variety that day, I regret not suing my ex-boss for sexual harassment, and I regret sucking the life out of all my relationships… But Hollywood changes you, it makes you talk too much, sleep around and not sleep, and we are all vampires making bad movies, all of us, not just little D-Girl and her gasoline can and her trail of dead d-people.

However, it’s imperative I not live in the past, or I will join the ranks of lost D-Boys and Girls, all the weak-minded souls who left this town and didn’t have the guts I have mustered to actually come back. I need a job, and I’m tired of feeling sorry, saying sorry, and acting sorry. Nobody cares if you are sorry… So, I put on my cutest skirt and black patent leather Burberry Mary-Janes and go on my first job interview in a long time. It’s not really a real job interview, it’s with a placement agency, but they are very chic, and a hugely famous actors’ assistant referred me through a friend. It’s hard to explain the gaping hole in my resume, it’s tough to tell this young and eager job-finder girl that I didn’t just leave the business for a while, I left life. But I look cute, and she looks like the type of girl who appreciates cuteness.

Four hours later, I leave the interview feeling like maybe I left a little too much on the table. She was so adorable, and friendly, and I started talking and just couldn’t stop. I told her about Sarah, and how she lived on a boat and was my best friend in Hollywood, and how we used to read scripts every free second we had, when we weren’t screwing or getting screwed by the bottom and middle rungs of Hollywood’s semi-elite. I told her how I started out here, as the second assistant to a very powerful and short man, and that he fired me for missing a call. She was curious about Development, as she only deals with talent, not scripts, and I explained to her in glowing terms the joy of being a D-Girl: finding projects for our bosses to produce, reading until our eyes bled and networking every waking second of the day. She seemed impressed, and I admit it was glamorous, especially when I became an executive and Sarah and I were blessed with unlimited expense accounts, but I wonder if she can see the slight shake in my hands as I am not the young farm girl who moved out here so long ago looking to get into the movies.

Halfway through the meeting, we ended up at drinks, and, okay, I guess I have a new regret because after 3 vodka Red Bulls I told her about the time me and my New York best friend offered a threesome to a guy who is in a wheelchair and then chickened out. We weren’t sure how it would work, mechanically speaking, but I have since seen that he has had a kid, so I think everything works fine, we just got nervous. I don’t know why in the world I would talk about this to someone who was supposed to be finding me a job, but I really want her to like me. She asks me a lot of questions about my old bosses, personal stuff verboten on the sheaths of confidentiality agreements I signed, so I artfully evade the inquisition and try to steer the conversation towards the future. I intend to rebuild my career out here, trying this time not to sleep my way across town, and it’s possible I got a tad bit prettier since last I was out here, I am a late, late bloomer -- so maybe this time I don’t have to try so hard to make friends.

We leave drinks and there is a slight stumble in my step to add to the tremor in my hand, but luckily she is much drunker than me, and we tempt the DUI Gods by getting our respective BMW’s from the valet (mine, a 1993, hers seems… newer). She gives me a hug, wants to hang out, will get me a great job, blah blah blah. I should save her some time and energy and just screw her over now; it always ends that way anyway. I drive home optimistic, and feeling magnanimous because whoever hires me is getting a former executive as an assistant, and this girl seems bored and needs a new friend. I am overqualified for both positions: the new best friend and the assistant. I have too many friends already, most of them neglected, the ones who haven’t jumped ship, and it’s been a long time but not too long ago since I brought my old boss at the Big Action Company’s sperm to his wife’s doctor for in vitro and thus earned my honorable ranking in the Hollywood Assistant Hall of Fame.

Hopefully my new best friend will actually find me a job. She works with actors and directors, anybody high-profile looking for an assistant, and I’m hoping she hooks me up with someone creative so I can read scripts again and develop material, because it seems that’s my gift, whereas the political aspect of working in such an incestuous community was perhaps not my strongest suit. But at this point, I’ll take anything, because I’m attempting to do the impossible: I’m trying to break back into prison. If I end up having to buy tampons for some spoiled celebrity it is probably my temporary lot in life, some karmic retribution for those burnt bridges, and luckily I left my pride along the sides of roads on the way home to New York along with my totaled Volkswagen a few years ago.

The next day I have lunch with Adam, who was my moral compass when we worked in Hollywood, and he still works out here, although his stature has vastly improved, which is the case with most of my Hollywood friends who did not move back home and marry their high-school sweetheart in a desperate attempt to revive their inevitably drained spirits. He runs a company now, for a big actor/director, and I value his opinion and advice. He took a whole different road than I: he was quiet and diligent, and worked hard and was rewarded for his efforts. He stayed loyal to his boss for years, when most people would have used their boss’ clout to move on to bigger things. Adam is supportive about my move back to Los Angeles, but dubious about my attempt to get a real job. He wants me to be writer, not a player, and I couldn’t agree more. I promise him I have not come out here to play. We talk about the time in Sundance when we crawled through a window in a garage to get into a good party, and he seems healed from all his scars inflicted on him by a soulless town. As I head home I am reminded by seeing him that there is a chance to work out here and not turn into garbage or the walking dead; he seems happy in his bubble of decency, and I am humbled by what must have been a tough decision on his part to stay my friend this whole time.

When I get home I try and gain some Karma points by reading my sister’s friend’s script: it’s about a baseball player with Autism, and it makes my brain hurt. When the script abruptly ends on page 75 without a thought towards structure, I almost envy the guy for being so naive. It was a simple time before I knew the exact pages on which things need to happen in a script. Writing a script without proper structure is like living back in your twenties and not realizing there are actual consequences to your actions. I wish I didn’t know so well about those consequences, to life and the movies, I could enjoy things so much more – dumb movies and bad decisions -- but I’m all grown up now and my story, like every good story ever told, has three acts. I’m grateful to be past the carefree but foreboding First Act, wistful for the fast-paced antics of Act Two, but looking forward to the Third Act when everything ties up neatly and I am rewarded for my efforts and forgiven for my mistakes in judgment. I believe the Third Act began today, with my interview, and I am still working out the kinks but this is going to be the kind of movie I would want to see on a rainy Saturday -- D-Girl will come out okay in the end, I promise.

September 30, 2009

2009-09-30T14:55:00.000-07:00

September 30, 2009

Things to Do:

1. Get a job.

2. Or, sell a script.

3. Write a script (may have a better time selling it if it’s actually written and not in my head).

4. Set up a friend’s script and get producer credit (if the writing thing doesn’t pan out).

5. Call every guy I’ve slept with in L.A. and guilt them into getting me a job.

I feel like Greta Garbo, without the fame or the beauty, but in hiding from nobody in particular and peering out from behind sunglasses too big for my face. I’m driving my fifth car since I first moved to Hollywood, and I’m missing New York and all the people stacked up on top of me. It’s too swanky out here; I prefer to live like a little gnome in my Hell’s Kitchen Apartment as big as a thumbnail where I couldn’t steal cable as easily. But, alas, it seems I've worn out my welcome in NYC, so it’s back to L.A., and an older car and an apartment further east. I figure someone out here must owe me a favor. So I start at the Big Three Agency parking lots, littering BMW’s with pictures of someone’s baby and I write with a red felt tip pen: “Had a great time at drinks last year… we should do it again, little Billy would love to meet his Daddy…” That should get their attention…

As I drive home east on Wilshire, I think of my little life that has spurned so much vitriol in such a huge and sprawling city; there’s not a street in West Hollywood that doesn’t remind me of a friend I’ve lost, and although I miss them all, I don’t miss what made us friends in the first place: the parties and drugs, and the pace that made me literally fall to the ground and crawl back to New York. But for all the clawing and grasping up the rungs of Hollywood, I ended up working for the biggest Star of all in New York City, despite you all, and although I’m back, I’m back with an air of superiority because I’ve restocked turkey breast in the Big Movie Star’s NYC apartment, and even though it was a lawsuit that ripped me kicking and screaming from my office in her production company, I still proudly bear the badge of honor that I worked with her, and not the Hollywood “drinks-with-other-assistants” worked, but real work, the kind you can actually see up on the movie screen.

So fuck you, Sarah and the also-named-Sarah, for taking the easy road and joining the mass exodus of friends, because it’s quite possible our paths will cross again, and probably smack dab in the middle of a hugely important writer’s meeting for the new TV show I am developing, or casting session for the movie I single-handedly set up at a studio… Or, more realistically, we’ll run into each other at a West Hollywood bar and you’ll look like you’ve seen a ghost and drag your precious boyfriend out of the bar before I start to talk and spill all your secrets… Don’t worry Sarah, either Sarah, your secrets are safe with me, the only reputation I’m interested in ruining is what’s left of my own, because it’s better to be talked about than to be forgotten.

Which reminds me, better start beating on drums, remind people I’m here, and although baby pictures on Agents’ cars was funny, it’s not enough to bring back D-Girl, I need a job, a reason for people to be my friend, I need to work for someone famous again while I pen my already-scorned memoirs.

So I call a staffing agency referred to me by my friend who works for a Big Director, and set an interview. I briefly cite my impressive resume and insist on only high profile jobs, and my list of previous employers is awe-inspiring: Huge Action Director, Comedy Genius, Academy Award winning Actress… It all reads well on paper. If the agency only knew how most of my jobs ended: with lawsuits or fear of lawsuits, and, barring either, a trail of whispered rumors that are all more than half-true. I escaped barely alive but alive nonetheless, with resume intact, and right now it’s all about that. I’m sure the stories will get out, but I prefer to tell them, so it’s time to resurrect D-Girl, because I need a job and this is all I know how to do.

Finally home, in my shoebox of an apartment near Korea Town, my old BMW overheating and my touch-screen cell phone malfunctioning, I lie down in my bed, really the only place to sit in this tiny room, and I’m tired from even thinking of bringing back D-Girl. She made me ill in a real and terrifying way, Hospital sick, and I’d like to say I never looked back, but all I have done is look back and think of how I would do things differently, so here it is, now’s my chance – I still know a lot of people out here, people who think I’m funny or cute. I know I can do this. So much has changed: instead of the pile of scripts that should be piled near my bed, scripts are on email now, and my Inbox is already filled with recently sold mediocre masterpieces, the kindling for this fiery town. It’s almost midnight and I’m exhausted. The old D-Girl would still be out on the town, basking in the Roosevelt’s view of speckled city lights with an eager newly promoted agent drooling on her Jimmy Choos… but the new D-Girl has just started reading, and emailing, and papering Facebook with news of my return, and the apathy is overwhelming but I’m determined to remind people why they hate me. It’s going to be a long, long night.