Calvin comes back all coked up, hooting and hollering and doing a stupid jig he does after he nailed it. He goes on Tinder.
“Jesus,” I say. “Didn’t you just hook up last night?”
He nods. “That’s not what I’m doing now. I’m working it, Joe Bro. Tinder is the most important casting database in the world,” he raves. “The place where every actor and actress is hanging out, like what the club used to be, or the drugstore soda fountain was in, like, the fifties.” He burps. “Fucking Tinder, dude. My buddy Leo, he got cast off Tinder last week.”
“But isn’t it just dating and shit?” I protest. I don’t want this to be true. I don’t want to join and I don’t want Amy to be on there Tindering around.
Calvin burps. “Swipe. Fuck. Book.”
I have no choice. I join. I swipe. And twenty-four hours later, I think my eyes are broken and my head is so full of faces that I worry the visual part of my brain might run out of room. There are so many girls. And they’re all here. It’s an infinite database and when girls on Tinder wander into my five-mile radius, I can see them in my phone. Now Tinder is taking over my brain and every time I swipe, I picture Amy in a USC shirt, yawning and strolling out of my radius and I can’t stop swiping because I have to find her. I don’t sleep at all for two fucking days.
It’s the most pathetic move yet and I think California is getting to me. I call Mr. Mooney. He has no patience. “I told you,” he snaps. “Get your goddamn dick sucked.”
So I try. I meet a girl named Gwen on Tinder and it’s like ordering Chinese food. In the pictures, Gwen is shiny and rested, glistening like pork-fried rice. Gwen shows up and she isn’t as shiny in person, same way the pork-fried rice is always greasier than you want it to be. Her skin is puffy. She is pale. She is proof that they can’t all be California girls and she tells me about her acting class and her last bad Tinder date. She drinks red wine and looks at herself in the mirror. Her teeth stain. She sneezes. I say God bless you. I drink vodka and search the bar for Amy. It’s different being here with a woman instead of Calvin. I’m staring at people and Gwen notices. “I was the same way my first month,” she says. “Everyone’s just so much prettier here. Even the men.”
Naturally, while I’m at the bar with Gwen, I see the most attractive girl I’ve ever seen in my life. And I can’t put my finger on it. She is not classically beautiful by any means and she is hardly young. Her off-the-shoulder soft sweatshirt showcases the right amount of her boobs, like two scoops of ice cream, soft and creamy. Her hair is cotton candy. Her legs are caramel. When the bartender brings me the glass of water I asked for an hour ago, the candy girl and I reach for it at the same time.
“I’m so sorry,” she says.
“Take it,” I say.
She smiles. It would be a dick move to hit on her in front of Gwen and I am not a dick. This is why I agree to see Gwen’s new apartment. She lives in a guesthouse by a pool in Los Feliz. It’s depressing and small and there are pictures of Madonna everywhere. Gwen humps me and I close my eyes and picture the candy girl. We use each other. She sucks my dick.
I spend the night in Gwen’s guesthouse and this is where it’s true when the deluded aspiring actors say that the business is all about timing. The one fucking night I leave the Village and fall asleep in Los Feliz, I wake to three texts from Calvin:
Dude girl here with Portnoy Complaint
She’s being weird about money wants cash not direct deposit you want to buy it off her?
All good, she was in a rush so we worked it out got it 4 u
My hands are shaking and this guesthouse smells like soup and I am out of the squeaky bed and I am looking for my shoes and fuck. This is my fault. I lost my focus. I have to get out of here but I can’t find my fucking shoe and I look under the bed and it’s nothing but dildos and stilettos and acting manuals. Fuck my shoes. I don’t deserve them.
My Lyft is one minute away and I step out into the overbearing, in-your-face, moronic sun and I duck my head and here are my shoes, lined up next to Gwen’s, as if she wanted the people in the big house to know about this, about us.
I get into the Lyft and the driver wants to know if he should take Franklin or Fountain and he doesn’t have sunglasses and the AC is broken and he misspells the name of my street in his GPS. The phrase one-night stand is a misnomer. There is no such thing as a one-night stand. Sometimes, what you do for one night destroys your future.
11
IT’S not a book. It’s a screenplay. White, thin, single-sided pages bound by brass tacks. Calvin rubs his eyes. Stoned. Sucking on a kale smoothie. “Dude, you said Portnoy’s Complaint.”
I am livid. “The book.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Right thiggity there.”
“This is a screenplay,” I hiss. “Who collects screenplays?”
“JoeBro, don’t take this the wrong way, but you need to chill. Have you ever done a juice fast?” He hits a pack of American Spirits against the desk. “You get so intense. That gets your cortisol going. Cortisol is not cool.”
This is like getting pulled over for not using your blinker and I could kill Calvin. I could kill Amy. I could kill everyone and put them in a blender and make them into a smoothie. Fast Five is on the TV and I watch Dominic Toretto and RIP Brian O’Conner assemble a team. My team fucking sucks.
“JoeBro,” Calvin says. “You got Tinder banged and you look all miserable and shit.”
“I rushed over here for the book.”
“Well, like, the screenplay is about the book, so, like, it’s kind of the book, only in different form, like the way iced coffee is still coffee even though it’s cold.”
I can’t help it. “Fuck off, Calvin,” I snap.
“Dude,” he says. “You need to chill.”
Toretto never chills because you don’t get anywhere in this world by being chill and Calvin is going on about a Flaming Lips LP and food trucks and Big Bear and bacon, about how wasted he was last night. I wish I had Cocaine Calvin. Pothead Calvin is impossible, a no-talent Duplass brother, smug and slow. His buds are texting. They’re at some fucking market downtown and they can bring us lunch and Calvin still doesn’t get that I don’t drink vegetables or care about dope food trucks in K-Town. I care about books.
I tell him I’m not hungry and he says I need to laugh and he gives me his iPad and commands me to watch a killer Henderson video. I tell him I don’t want to watch the video but he says that I have to. “Henderson is on,” he says. “He goes off on his new girlfriend and this dope is gold. This gold is dope. Genius.”
Everyone here calls everything genius. “Calvin.”
“JoeBro, you need to chill,” he says. “Watch. Chill. Be.”
But how can I be chill when Delilah is texting, clinging, and Calvin is yammering about pitching Ghost Food Truck to Comedy Central or IFC. He might get weird with it and go to Adult Swim and he’s banging the vaporizer that never works against the counter and his ego swells and Ghost Food Truck would actually be mellower on HBO and maybe you could even put John Cusack in that truck and maybe he would pick up girls and disappear and look for the girls and never find them, because like, it’s a Ghost Food Truck and he’s a ghost and he doesn’t know it. I give in and tell Calvin it’s genius and he texts his writing partner Slade and I would bet my nuts that Calvin and Slade will never write Ghost Food Truck the cartoon, the movie, or the HBO series. People in LA talk about writing but they don’t actually do it. It’s the LA equivalent of going to the Cloisters or the Met in New York. You say you’re going to do it but at the end of the day it’s Saturday or it’s too hot or it’s too cold or you could just as easily watch TV.