8
THE first song I hear in LAX is that ditzy fucking Tom Tom Club song about getting out of jail and it sobers me up, hard. A UCLA brat bashes into me with her oversized suitcase. People are pushy and tourists are slamming into me, all of them on an exodus to get pictures of Sean Penn, who is in baggage claim. In New York, people fight to make a train to get home or to make it to the squished aisles of Trader Joe’s. In LA, people fight to smell an actor, an old man.
I’ve received two electronic communications since I landed.
One is from Harvey: Wow! You have perfect credit! Most people who move here have horrible credit!
It is my destiny to know people who abuse punctuation. The other one is from Calvin: We have a Blu-ray so bring any movies you wanna watch during shift.
You aren’t supposed to watch movies in a bookstore and I get into a cab and the driver taps the address of Hollywood Lawns into his GPS and I wonder if Amy took a cab or a shuttle. I wonder when the wondering will stop. I hate this part of the split, when that girl just lives in your head. I need to get laid and we take La Cienega and the city gets glitzier as you go north and I see women in nighttime dresses walking around in the day, like this is okay. I see homeless people like from Down and Out in Beverly Hills and I see the Capitol Records building and my heart quickens when we reach Franklin Avenue—Amy, Amy, Amy—and when I emerge from the cab I step into dog shit.
“Fuck,” I seethe. My head pounds, the sun, the excessive vodka.
The driver laughs. “People in LA, man, they like their doggies.”
Hollywood Lawns looks like the building in Karate Kid and the dogs trapped in the small hot apartments bark as I walk up the stairs. The for rent sign beams: month to month. I wonder if Amy lives here, in this very building. You never know. She is just the kind of lying transient who would gravitate toward this; her sublet in New York was week to week. I should have known then, but your dick makes you blind.
Harvey looks older in person, waxen, arched eyebrows. It’s hard to look at him and I let him talk to me about his act and I agree to get drinks with him. He tells me my apartment is on the first floor, right by his office, and I brainstorm future excuses to avoid time with him. He warns me about ridiculous shit. “One thing you gotta know about the ’hood, newbie,” he says. “This isn’t New York. You can’t be jaywalking. They will ticket you and those tickets will add up.”
“I knew LA was an anti-walking city but that’s fucking ridiculous,” I say.
Harvey smiles. “You sound like me when I see Joe Rogan on TV. Downright ridiculous. Am I right or am I right?”
Conversations about Joe Rogan are not a part of my life so I don’t encourage him, the way you don’t laugh at a child who swears. “Hey,” I say. “I saw the sign outside. Do you get a lot of people moving in all the time?”
“World’s full of dreamers,” he says. “Do you have friends looking?”
“Yeah,” I say. And this is where I have to tread lightly. I don’t want to say that I’m looking for Amy Adam because then, when she disappears, I will be a suspect. I am careful. “I know this girl looking,” I say. “But she wants a share.”
Fact: Amy has never had her own place. She’s a leech.
Harvey nods. “If I had a nickel for every hot babe who moves in here to sleep on the couch and pay half the rent . . .” He shakes his head. “I’d be able to paper the walls with nickels! Am I right or am I right?”
Harvey introduces me to another guy in the building, Dez, entitled, thug-light. He lives on the first floor too, and he looks like an extra in an Eminem video circa 2000. Dez has a dog, Little D, and some advice for me.
He looks at me hard. “Do. Not. Fuck. Delilah.”
I nod. “Word.”
I need someone like this on my team, someone fluent in California ’90s moron douchebag language who no doubt has access to Xanax and various narcotics.
Harvey digs up the keys to my new home and tells me that Delilah is just sweet and friendly and I know this means desperate and slutty and he says a lot of the guys in the building are crass. “It’s kinda like I’m the talk show host and everybody comes into my office to work out their bits,” he says. Why must everyone want to be Henderson? “So you come by anytime, work stuff out. It’s like a Seth MacFarlane vibe in here, ya know, Broseph?”
“Sounds great,” I lie.
“Am I right or am I right?” he asks, as if he has a contract with himself to spew out his own catchphrase at least twice an hour.
My apartment smells like rotten oranges and chicken and it’s full of pink furniture, girl furniture. The former tenant Brit Brit moved out suddenly, against her will.
“Her parents showed up here all upset,” Harvey says, turning on a pink bubble-shaped lamp and illuminating a Kandinsky poster. “She spent half the money they gave her on a nose job and the rest on nose candy and then she wound up in a hospital cuz her nose bled.” He shakes his head and pats the hot pink futon. “I know there’s a joke in there. Funny things come in threes. I’m gonna find it, I swear. Anyhoo, the good news is you scored, Broseph. The futon, the chicken in the freezer, the TV, it’s all yours. Her parents wanted us to dump it.”
At least I don’t have to go to IKEA. “Great.”
Harvey picks up the trash can. “I know one thing you don’t want is old chicken. BRB, Broseph!”
It’s the first almost funny thing he’s said. I pull a Rachael Ray knife out of the new knife block on the counter. These are useful, sharp, though I wish the handles weren’t orange. I flop onto the futon and the cover is stained, Sriracha and semen. That taped-up Kandinsky makes me miss New York. I miss sex. There is a knock at the door and then a girl barges in. She is like one of the girls I saw on the street. Full makeup and a bandage spandex dress that’s one size too small. She is hot but not as hot as she thinks. I want her on my team, possibly on my dick.
“Relax,” she says. “I’m Delilah and I’m just here for the blender.”
I almost tell her that her nickname is Don’t Fuck Delilah, but she is talking too much for me to get a word in edgewise. She is late to work—gossip reporting—and she lives directly upstairs—apologies for noises you hear in the future, the walls are paper thin—and that fucking coke whore promised her a blender. She’s opening the closets, slamming them.
Delilah is full of rage. Maybe she knows there is a building ordinance against her vagina. She points at the Kandinsky. “Technically that’s mine too,” she says. “But I think you’ll appreciate it. You look like you might even know who that is.”
“Andrew Wyeth,” I say.
She nods. “Nice,” she says. “Brit Brit had no idea who that was. Did Shut-Up Harvey tell you about her?”
Everyone has a nickname. “A little,” I say. “Sounds like a sad story.”
Delilah tells me that Brit Brit came here to act and wound up hooking. “She would go to Vegas with guys and come back messed up,” she says. “And she kept trying to get me to go with her, talking about how amazing these guys are and how you don’t have to pay for anything and you stay at the Cosmo and have the time of your life.”
“Hmm.”
“Exactly,” she says. “So I pack a bag to go with her. I mean, I know I’m not actually going but I wanted to see them all at the airport in case there was anyone famous in there, anyone I could write about. And at the airport, in one breath, she’s like, ‘Oh, by the way, you have to fuck at least two of them but you get to pick which two and it’s not bad I swear!’”