10
BUT she wasn’t there. She didn’t go to La Pou that night, or any night. And now it’s been a month and I’ve tried everything—hiking, Craigslist, breaking into Harvey’s occupant database, even Pilates—but I still can’t fucking find Amy. All I have to show for it is a farmer’s tan and a bunch of new muted button-down shirts that I never would have bought in New York. My brain hates me for all the stupid casting calls I’ve posted. None of it works. I stay optimistic. I listen to “Patience” by Guns N’ Roses and I think of hunters and explorers who spent countless nights in the wild, unsure of where they were, or if they would find what they were looking for. But LA is fucking monotonous and it’s wearing on me, the way I keep not finding her. And when I try to talk to people, everyone says the same thing: Tinder!
Fuck them. Amy’s not on Tinder. She’s too smart. Too phony. Too old-fashioned. We are the same. I get so mad that I can’t sleep and Dez laughs—you do like your downers—and I collect Percocets, just in case I need to drug her.
I hate it here. Everyone is wrong. Delilah is bad at flirting. Harvey is too aggressive about drinking. And every day is actually three days, a freezing morning, a blistering day, and a cool night. You need a lot of clothes. And every day is the same day, which is why it’s important to hang a calendar. I see why people move here and wake up one day scratching their heads, wondering when they turned forty or what year it is.
It’s claustrophobic and I have no car and I hate Amy for not being on Facebook, for not having an e-mail I could hack. I live almost exclusively in this one giant square of earth bound by Tamarind Avenue on the west and Canyon Drive on the east. In New York, you can walk for hours and go unnoticed and you can follow a woman for several blocks without her knowing. But the cliché is real and people don’t walk here unless it’s to improve their precious fucking bodies or to reach another form of transportation, a car, a bus, a Lyft. They put on sneakers and carry silver canteens around and what I would do to just have one hour on Seventh Avenue in the middle of the night. I miss being invisible. I think I might be getting fat too.
Every day some awful noise wakes me up, Stevie from the Pantry accidentally texting me instead of his girlfriend, Harvey practicing with his ukulele, or people showing up to shoot piece of shit shorts in the building. I am not a snob, but the average person here is just, well . . . it’s not New York. I stare at my popcorn ceiling and think about my beautiful old apartment. I check up on Pearl & Noah & Harry & Liam; I live vicariously through them now. Sometimes I think about friending them and confessing everything. Maybe Amy mixed up and told one of the girls something that would help me find her. But she’s a professional. She knew what she was doing.
AT the beginning of July I sign a rent check and hand it over to Harvey.
“Don’t look glum,” he says. “They say it takes about ten years to settle in here. You gotta stay positive. Am I right or am I right?”
I give him the thumbs-up he wants so badly and he claps and I flee and I’m so sick of the stupidity of it all, Harvey and his big fucking smile, my boss Calvin, who is a whole other kind of annoying.
It’s nothing like Mooney Books and Calvin is one of those people who is better on Facebook than he is in real life. He would be wiser to evaporate and live exclusively online with his telegenic swath of thick, dark hair. I want to wipe it the fuck off his forehead and take his stupid oversized eyeglasses too. I feel that way a lot here, like I want to tear people’s clothes off their bodies in a nonsexual way, shave their heads, line them all up for Silkwood showers. Calvin keeps all his passwords on a piece of paper in his wallet, fucking moron, and there’s always a movie playing in the bookstore, as if this is a video rental store in the ’90s. Today it’s True Romance so that Calvin can tell me for the fiftieth time that they shot part of it up the street on Beachwood.
“Sup, Joe-Bro?”
“Sup, Calvin.”
Something is always up with Calvin and he launches into a story about his manager that sounds made up. In the past month I’ve learned that there are many Calvins, dependent on which drugs he’s on. There is Cocaine Calvin, amping up for a Better Call Saul audition. There is Marijuana Calvin, chill and watching Tarantino and dreaming of being in a Tarantino movie and laughing out loud at jokes that are meant to make you smile. There is Reject Actor Calvin, gut protruding through a tight purple T-shirt, glasses on, reeking of hair products, telling me to be quiet because he’s visualizing.
Some days, Calvin is a writer. He puts his hair in a ponytail. He works on something called Ghost Food Truck. Some days it’s a self-aware campy teen horror flick about a haunted food truck. Some days it’s a pitch for IFC about a food truck that is run by ghosts. Offbeat, he likes to say, as if this somehow means a TV show doesn’t need a story. Still other days GFT is a pilot script—possible HBO or FX but never network—about a serial killer who roams the country killing people and making burritos out of them. The thing is, Ghost Food Truck is like Calvin and like everyone here, so flipping flimsy. It changes depending on what he watched last night. On what his friends watched.
At least today I’m dealing with the good kind of Cocaine Calvin. He’s dancing and pounding his chest and telling me about True Romance again and he’s best like this, getting hyped for an audition, wearing himself out like a toddler. He leaves to try and make it in Hollywood and I post another useless casting call on Craigslist—tall blond beautiful.
My listings are getting more uninspired as time goes by and every day that Amy doesn’t submit a headshot to one of my imaginary castings, I feel like a detective in one of those shows where they hit you over the head with the fact that a missing child becomes almost impossible to find when twenty-four hours pass. It could drive you nuts, searching for someone in LA, and that’s why people here are so miserable. It is fucking hard to find things. Fame. Love. Parking spots. Cheap gas. Good inexpensive headshots. An agent. A manager. A happy hour where the nachos don’t suck. A tall blond con artist named Amy.
It’s been a long month without rain, without clouds, without a sighting. And it sickens me to look back because I’ve done my part. I set my traps. I assembled my team. Calvin knows to text me the second anyone walks into this place with a copy of Portnoy’s Complaint and Amy should have been in by now. How does she pay for her fucking superfruits?
Harvey knows to tell me if any new girls show up, tall blondes in college shirts. Dez too. Deana from Birds quit, but I set better traps there, as well as at La Pou and all the places in between. I bought bottles of prenatal vitamins and told the bartenders that my estranged girlfriend is pregnant. I worked up some tears. The female bartenders at Birds said we’re all family in the Village and they couldn’t get over how sweet I am, carrying vitamins around. The guy behind the bar at La Poubelle was empathetic. He looked me in the eye and lifted the bag and promised me he’d be on the lookout. I had so much hope. So why the fuck haven’t I found her?